At Amazon's biggest data centre, everything is supersized for AI

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By Karen Weise & Cade Metz

 

A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centres rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium. 

Over the next several years, Amazon plans to build around 30 data centres at the site, packed with hundreds of thousands of specialised computer chips. 

With hundreds of thousands of miles of fibre connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence. The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the AI startup Anthropic, which aims to create an AI system that matches the human brain. 

The complex — so large that it can be viewed completely only from high in the sky — is the first in a new generation of data centres being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters. Project Rainier is Amazon’s entry into a race by the technology industry to build data centres so large they would have been considered absurd just a few years ago. 

The data centres will dwarf most of today’s, which were built before OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot inspired the AI boom in 2022.

The tech industry’s increasingly powerful AI technologies require massive networks of specialised computer chips — and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the data centres that house those chips. The result: behemoths that stretch the limits of the electrical grid and change the way the world thinks about computers. 

Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, will rent computing power from the new facility to its startup partner. An Anthropic cofounder, Tom Brown, who oversees the company’s work with Amazon on its chips and data centres, said having all that computing power in one spot could allow the startup to train a single AI system.

 

Ambitious plans

 

Amazon’s facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes

 

It will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating

 

The facility was built with a single customer in mind: the AI startup Anthropic

 

Anthropic aims to create an AI system that matches the human brain