As first reported by the Financial Times on July 30, 2026, an internal Amazon project that used Claude to match author records to product listings ran 860% over budget, burned about $1.8 million over five months before anyone noticed, and never launched. Other internal tools went $541,000 and $134,000 over budget, and Amazon scrapped an internal AI-usage leaderboard after employees gamed it by inflating token consumption.
A Nikkei Asia investigation found that Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle carry about $1.65 trillion in off-balance-sheet obligations from the AI buildout: data-center leases, GPU supply contracts, joint ventures, and special-purpose vehicles. That exceeds the $1.35 trillion of debt the five officially report and has grown roughly eightfold in four years. Moody's warns many leases are pre-operational, and Morgan Stanley puts industry-wide exposure near $1.8 trillion.
On July 21, 2026 Iran's Revolutionary Guard announced its Aerospace Force launched cruise missiles at Amazon's central data infrastructure in Bahrain and destroyed it, framing the strike as part of Operation Nasr 2 and retaliation for a US strike on a facility in Darkhovin a day earlier. The named target region, AWS ME-South-1, live since 2019, was Amazon's first cloud region in the Middle East. Amazon, the US and Bahrain have not confirmed anything, and no independent evidence of destruction has surfaced: this remains a claim, not a fact.
On July 7, 2026, Amazon launched a US bond sale of at least $25 billion across eight tranches with maturities from 3 to 40 years. Investor demand peaked at $62 billion before pricing tightened, with final orders near $41 billion, about 1.6 times the deal size. The proceeds fund data centers, chips and power, as combined AI spending by Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta is expected to top $700 billion in 2026.