“Project Moonraker”: Amazon invests heavily in Alexa’s brain upgrade

Amazon is developing a new Alexa project, codenamed Moonraker, designed to let its voice assistant complete several tasks from a single request. Eugene Kim reports for Business Insider that internal planning documents describe the project as enabling “multi-request” engagements, such as booking a ride and texting a friend in one interaction.

Moonraker builds on Alexa+, the AI assistant Amazon already offers through partners like Uber and Ticketmaster. The new system pushes Alexa further into the growing field of agentic AI, joining efforts from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, all of which have built assistants that can browse the web and handle multistep workflows.

A costly bet

According to the documents, Moonraker has become one of the most expensive parts of Amazon’s Alexa+ overhaul. One planning document from earlier this year calls it the “highest cost” new initiative, projecting more than $100 million in GPU costs for 2026. The document even suggests delaying or scaling back the project to ease budget pressure.

A person familiar with the matter tells Business Insider that some Amazon leaders believe the team has overspent on the AI models running Alexa, a concern that echoes a broader industry reckoning over the cost of deploying advanced AI systems. Separate documents from late last year show Amazon preparing hundreds of Nvidia GPUs for Moonraker and testing an Anthropic Sonnet model for reasoning and visual responses.

Alexa+ has faced setbacks before, including delayed rollouts and reports of hallucinations. Still, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his shareholder letter that customer engagement with Alexa has doubled, calling the assistant “early in its journey” toward becoming the world’s best personal assistant. Amazon declined to comment.