Over the next 15 years, Amazon plans to spend $148 billion on data centers, which will allow it to cope with the expected explosive growth in demand for AI applications and other digital services, Bloomberg writes. AWS revenue growth fell to a record low last year as customers sought to cut costs and delayed modernization projects. Now their costs are starting to rise again, and Amazon is preparing land for future data center expansion and negotiating electricity supplies.
Amazon's planned data center spending exceeds the commitments of Microsoft and Alphabet's Google, although neither company discloses data center costs as consistently as Amazon, Bloomberg noted. “We are significantly expanding capacity,” said Kevin Miller, AWS vice president in charge of the company's data centers. “I think it just gives us the opportunity to get closer to our customers.”
The company plans to expand existing data centers in Northern Virginia and Oregon, as well as expand into new regions, including Mississippi, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. These efforts are mainly aimed at meeting the growing demand for enterprise services such as file storage and databases. However, these facilities, along with cutting-edge accelerators, are designed to provide the enormous computing power needed for the expected boom in generative AI.
By developing its own AI tools to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and partnering with other companies to power AI services on its servers, Amazon expects to make tens of billions of dollars.
Amazon has been the world's largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in recent years, part of its commitment to power all operations with renewable electricity by 2025. But that goal is difficult to achieve because of the mismatch between supply and demand that is wreaking havoc on the fragmented U.S. power grid.
Miller said the company continues to evaluate clean energy projects, including battery storage and nuclear power, to replace fossil fuel power plants. He promised to find a way to “meet energy demand through renewable, carbon-free energy.”
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