Amazon's Moonraker project to enhance Alexa+ proves pricey: report

Amazon's internal project, codenamed Moonraker, to upgrade Alexa+ with more advanced agentic AI has run into a cost problem, according to a Business Insider report. The company may spend more than $100 million on graphics processing units by 2026 just to support the initiative, the report said, citing people familiar with the project.

The $100 million figure for GPU procurement alone shows the cost of competing in the consumer AI assistant market. Amazon has been racing to catch up with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Alexa+ is its flagship response. The Moonraker project aims to give the assistant the ability to perform multi-step tasks autonomously, such as booking travel or managing smart home devices without repeated user prompts. The compute required to run those models, for both training and inference, is expensive.

Amazon's cloud unit, AWS, also sells access to Nvidia GPUs. The company's own AI projects consume a growing share of its internal capacity. The $100 million projection does not include engineering salaries, data center power, or ongoing software development costs. The report did not specify whether the spending would be concentrated in 2025 or spread across two years.

The cost pressure comes as Amazon's broader AI investments draw scrutiny from investors. The company reported $26.3 billion in capital expenditures in the fourth quarter, much of it tied to AI infrastructure. Chief Executive Andy Jassy has said the spending is necessary to capture long-term demand. Some analysts have questioned the near-term return on investment.

Alexa+ has not yet launched widely. Amazon introduced a preview of the upgraded assistant in February. It remains limited to select users. A wider rollout would require Amazon to deploy enough GPU capacity to handle millions of simultaneous requests. That scale could push costs well beyond the Moonraker projection.

Amazon's Alpha Score, a proprietary measure of fundamental and technical health, stands at 56 out of 100, with a label of Moderate. The stock, tracked on the AMZN stock page, traded at $245.98 on Friday, up 0.75% on the session.

The Moonraker project is one of several internal AI initiatives at Amazon. Others include the development of its own Trainium chips, designed to reduce reliance on Nvidia hardware. The shift to custom silicon takes time. The GPU spending on Moonraker signals that Amazon cannot wait for its own chips to catch up.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. The report did not include a timeline for when Moonraker's capabilities would be fully integrated into Alexa+.