Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is seeking to reassure investors who may be concerned about the future payoff of the company’s massive investments in generative artificial intelligence.

During a conference call with analysts following the company’s third-quarter earnings report on Thursday, Jassy pointed to the success of Amazon’s cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, which has become a crucial profit engine despite the extreme costs involved building data centers.

“I think we have proven over time that we can generate sufficient operating income and free cash flow to make this business a very successful return on invested capital,” Jassy said. “We expect the same thing to happen here with generative AI.”

Amazon spent $22.6 billion on property and equipment this quarter, up 81% from the year before. Jassy said Amazon plans to spend $75 billion on capital expenditures in 2024 and expects an even higher amount in 2025.

The jump in spending is mainly driven by generative AI investments, Jassy said. The company is rushing to invest in data centers, networking equipment and hardware to meet the huge demand for the technology, which has exploded in popularity since OpenAI released its ChatGPT assistant almost two years ago.

“It’s really an unusually big, maybe once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Jassy said. “And I think our customers, the company and our shareholders will feel good about this long term that we’re aggressively pursuing.”

AI spending was a major topic in tech revenue conversations this week. Meta raised capital spending guidance on Wednesday, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “quite pleased” with the team’s execution. In the meantime, MicrosoftOpenAI’s investment in OpenAI weighed on its fiscal first-quarter earnings results released Wednesday, and the company said capital expenditures would continue to rise. A day earlier, Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi warned that the company expects capital expenditures to grow in 2025.

Amazon has said its cloud division has raised more revenue from companies that need infrastructure to deploy generative AI models. It has also launched several AI products in recent months for businesses, third-party sellers on its marketplace, and advertisers. The company is expected to announce a souped-up version of its Alexa voice assistant that will include generative AI, something Jassy said will arrive “in the near future.”

Amazon hasn’t disclosed its generative AI revenue, but Jassy said Thursday that it has become a “multi-billion dollar business” within AWS that “continues to grow at a triple-digit percentage year-over-year.”

“It’s growing more than three times as fast at this stage of its evolution, while AWS itself was growing, and we felt like AWS was growing quite quickly,” he added.

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