Amazon Reworks Alexa+ to Rein In AI Costs

Amazon introduced Alexa+ on Feb. 26, 2025, recasting its voice assistant around generative AI, and made it broadly available in the U.S. on Feb. 4, 2026. The service costs $19.99 a month for non-Prime customers and is included with Prime. Its richer, conversational answers require far more GPU-intensive inference than the original Alexa, making per-query economics critical as Amazon pushes the assistant across millions of households and devices.

Business Insider reported on July 23, 2026, citing internal documents, that Alexa+ AWS cloud costs are projected to reach about $1.7 billion this year, nearly triple 2025 levels and roughly 60% above budget. Amazon is routing more requests to proprietary models, adding caching and using deterministic responses to avoid repeat inference. The overhaul is expected to lift transactions per unit of computing capacity by more than fourfold, with about $450 million in potential savings identified.