Amazon projects Alexa+ cloud costs of about $1.7 billion in 2026, weighs cuts to AI agent Moonraker

Amazon’s upgraded voice assistant is getting smarter. It is also getting a lot more expensive to run. Internal planning documents show Amazon projected approximately $1.7 billion in AWS cloud costs for Alexa+ in 2026. That figure nearly triples the prior year’s total. The documents also show Amazon weighing two cost-cutting moves. One is leaning less on Anthropic’s models. The other is spending less on Moonraker, an AI agent project tied to Alexa+. Where the money is going Generative AI features demand far more computing power per request than the old command-and-response Alexa did. According to the planning documents, Alexa+ draws on multiple models to deliver those features, and each conversation carries a real compute bill. The projected jump to approximately $1.7 billion is driven mainly by rising memory and component costs. Those same pressures are squeezing margins in Amazon’s device business. Amazon did go looking for savings. The company identified potential cuts of around $450 million across Alexa+ operations. A central piece of that plan involves moving some workloads away from Anthropic models and toward cheaper systems Amazon builds itself. Even with those savings on th...