Amazon Will Spend $100B On AI Data Center Developments

Amazon plans to spend more than $100B on new data centers over the next decade, a massive investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure for the world’s largest data center user.

The surge in capital spending on data centers, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, will grow Amazon’s substantial development pipeline. The Seattle-based tech giant has at least 216 data center buildings scheduled to come online over the next several years. 

Still, the company is fighting the perception that its Amazon Web Services cloud business is losing ground in the AI arms race to competitors like Microsoft that were quicker to make big public bets on generative AI and have subsequently nibbled away at Amazon’s market share. 

“We have to dive in. We have to figure it out,” AWS Chief Financial Officer John Felton said, according to the WSJ. “It’s a fascinating time to be here and think about how we can really think differently about how cloud computing works and how we can think differently about serving customers in the world of GenAI.”...

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RSK: I still think we will see more smaller regional data centers rather than several large ones. Why? Data centers are energy hungry monsters, so spreading them out around the grid may be a smart move...