Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

At the heart of Amazon’s success is an annual research and development budget that reached a staggering $36 billion in 2019, and which is used to develop everything from robots to smart home assistants. This sum leaves other companies – and many governments – behind. It is not far off the UK government’s annual budget for research and development.1 The entire US government’s federal R&D budget for 2018 was only $134 billion.2 Amazon spent more on R&D in 2018 than the US National Institutes of Health. Roche, the global pharmaceutical company renowned for its investment in research, spent a mere $12 billion in R&D in 2018.3 Meanwhile Tesco, the largest retailer in Britain – with annual sales in excess of £50 billion (approximately $70 billion) – had a research lab whose budget was in the ‘six figures’ in 2016.4 Perhaps more remarkable is the rate at which Amazon grew this budget. Ten years earlier, Amazon’s research budget was $1.2 billion. Over the course of the next decade, the firm increased its annual R&D budget by about 44 per cent every year.