Amazon workers relying on food stamps and Medicaid have nearly tripled in number since 2020, a federal watchdog found, even as the company plans to spend $200 billion (£148 billion) on artificial intelligence (AI) this year while taxpayers cover their grocery bills.

The findings come from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report requested by Senator Bernie Sanders and released on 22 July. It reviewed benefit records across 11 states that hold nearly a fifth of the US population.

In those states, 12,346 Amazon staff were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and 11,338 were on Medicaid, roughly triple the totals from the previous review in 2020.

Amazon ranked second among traditional employers of aid recipients, behind Walmart, which had 16,055 workers on Medicaid and 15,515 on SNAP. FedEx also climbed sharply, its Medicaid enrolment more than tripling over the period.

Ride-hailing and delivery platforms including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Instacart together became the single largest source of SNAP recipients, a category the watchdog barely registered in 2020. The shift shows how contract work, not only warehouse jobs, has reshaped the low-wage economy.

DoorDash disputed the framing, pointing to a survey suggesting a third of its couriers work to avoid needing such aid.

The contrast with Amazon’s spending is sharp. The company’s annual profit grew from $11.59 billion (£8.6 billion) to $77.67 billion (£57 billion) over roughly the study window. It first guided investors towards $200 billion in capital spending for 2026, then lifted that to $220 billion (£162 billion) on 30 July, with chief executive Andy Jassy blaming higher memory chip costs.

Most of the money funds massive, high-performance AI data centres for Amazon Web Services (AWS), where segment revenue rose an impressive 37% in the second quarter.

Jassy explicitly told investors that this historic capital outlay tracks real, immediate enterprise demand rather than speculative market hype, emphasising that the technology giant still simply cannot build out infrastructure and server capacity fast enough.

Read More: Amazon spends $200 billion on AI as worker food stamp use triples and taxpayers cover the grocery bill