(Reuters) -Amazon.com 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.