Nov 24 (Reuters) - Amazon.com ( AMZN ) said on Monday it

would invest up to $50 billion to expand artificial intelligence

and supercomputing capacity for U.S. government customers, in

one of the largest cloud infrastructure commitments targeted at

the public sector.

The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add

nearly 1.3 gigawatts of new AI and high-performance computing

capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud

regions through new data centers equipped with advanced compute

and networking systems.

One gigawatt of computing power is roughly enough to power

about 750,000 U.S. households on average.

"This investment removes the technology barriers that have

held government back," Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said.

AWS is already a major cloud provider to the U.S.

government, serving more than 11,000 government agencies.

Tech companies, including OpenAI, Alphabet and

Microsoft, are pouring billions of dollars to build out

AI infrastructure, boosting demand for computing power required

to support the services.

Amazon's ( AMZN ) initiative aims to provide federal agencies with

enhanced access to a comprehensive suite of AWS AI services.

These include Amazon SageMaker for model training and

customization, Amazon Bedrock for deploying AI models and agents

and foundational models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic

Claude.