Wall Street is starting to waver when it comes to the extraordinary amount of money being poured into AI projects, so Amazon has a pitch to try to quell concern: spending through it. The company announced Monday new plans to spend $12 billion building new data centers in northwestern Louisiana, according to CNBC.
The new campuses will reportedly be built in Caddo and Bossier Parishes (Louisiana’s equivalent to a county). The company is claiming the projects will create a total of 540 full-time jobs working at the data center facilities and 1,700 ancillary roles like electricians, HVAC technicians, and security specialists.
Setting aside that companies have overestimated the number of jobs that their data centers will create, the idea that these facilities even get built assumes that the projects don’t get hit with significant public pushback. In December, Amazon had to pack up shop in Tucson, Arizona, where it planned to build a $3.6 billion data center project, until it became a battleground between developers and the general public. Not all of Louisiana feels particularly open to data centers, either, considering the New Orleans City Council has moved toward banning the projects for at least one year.
It’s just not the Average Joe turning on data center buildouts, either. Wall Street has suddenly started to feel a bit iffy about just how much money is getting poured into AI projects. A couple of weeks ago, Amazon shocked the Street by announcing plans for $200 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, about $50 billion more than analysts expected. Much of that is expected to go toward AI infrastructure, but the figure has investors suddenly feeling a bit unsure as to whether they’re actually going to get money back on this investment. Amazon’s stock price took a hit shortly after the announcement, but clearly didn’t deter the company from moving forward on making good on those spending plans.
Amazon is one of the biggest hyperscalers setting out for massive expansion, but it’s not alone. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon have pledged a combined $650 billion in capital expenditure for this year, driven by AI buildouts. That is a lot of money going toward funding a technology that a Goldman Sachs analyst recently said contributed “basically zero” to the country’s GDP last year. Investors have some appetite for spending now as long as the return on investment is massive down the road. The fact that no one seems to have figured that part out yet suddenly made some people wonder if betting basically the entire economy on discovering an infinite money glitch may have been a bad idea.
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