Amazon Pledges Up To $50 Billion To Expand AI, Supercomputing For US Government

Amazon is committing up to $50 billion to massively expand AI and supercomputing capacity for U.S. government cloud regions, adding 1.3 gigawatts of high-performance compute and giving federal agencies access to its full suite of AI tools. Reuters reports: The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud regions by building data centers equipped with advanced compute and networking technologies. The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud regions by building data centers equipped with advanced compute and networking technologies.

Under the latest initiative, federal agencies will gain access to AWS' comprehensive suite of AI services, including Amazon SageMaker for model training and customization, Amazon Bedrock for deploying models and agents, as well as foundation models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude. The federal government seeks to develop tailored AI solutions and drive cost-savings by leveraging AWS' dedicated and expanded capacity.

Intelligence

[Gavino]

Is one thing governments usually lack, along with common sense. What's 50 billion more, on top of a 34 trillion dollar debt? Is this the last act of stupidity, before the whole financial system collapses? Bezos fiddling while Rome burns?

Re: Intelligence

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

This could be described as facism in action. The point is to fan the flames of hysteria for profit. You wouldn't want to lose that race, right? Also , isn't Google doing the same thing? The street loves a good story.

Pledges?

[stoicfaux]

Amazon is "pledging" to expand capacity for government contracts? Any reason why we're not using the phrase "going to bill the government to cover the costs of the expansion" instead?

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Journalism is pretty much dead in this country.

To Build What

[sound+vision]

I have to question what these data centers would be used for. The guys at the controls don't seem to be angling to provide people healthcare, housing, jobs, or education in any capacity.

The same people who have been telling me my whole life that government can't do anything useful. Makes you wonder what they are doing with it, then.

Re:

[buck-yar]

With names like "AWS Top Secret" what do you think they'll be used for? Remember, Jeff Bezos grandfather was L.P. Gise, founder of DARPA which created the internet. Jeff formed amazon ("Cadabra" at the time) right after his grandfather died, guessing from the inheritance money.

not inheritance money

[buck-yar]

My mistake, Lawrence Preston Gise died a year and a half after Cadabra was founded.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

I have to question what these data centers would be used for.

To raise the stock price of power companies. Notice how they mention the power usage multiple times but never give any actual performance figures. I could do the same press release with a really big resistor.

I mean a really big resistor.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

I have to question what these data centers would be used for. The guys at the controls don't seem to be angling to provide people healthcare, housing, jobs, or education in any capacity.

The same people who have been telling me my whole life that government can't do anything useful. Makes you wonder what they are doing with it, then.

The outward plan, the one they admit, is the hope that they can replace the entire workforce with machines. Since the government has zero concern about anyone that can't provide for themselves, there's a "hidden" but corollary to the outwardly stated goal. Once they've removed the ability for people to provide for themselves, and therefore have enough game tokens (money) left over to spend on whatever products are being pushed by the owners, they'll need SOMEONE to buy things. And since they've managed to c

Let's keep in mind:

[buss_error]

Amazon persuaded NASA to use S3 rather than the object store NASA invented: Open Stack SWIFT. [slashdot.org]

Instead of being able to rely on their own work, with minimal cost, now NASA is locked into a multi-year monopoly and will be paying for it for decades. I see this as just another instance of corporations sucking the government tit forever. Maybe this time, it won't be. And Lucy could let Charlie Brown finally kick that football too.

Amazon is in it for the money of course. The question is does it make sense for the

Re:

[kriston]

Lots of colo companies charge for both ingress and egress. Network traffic isn't free. On the bright side, AWS only charges for ingress. I'm certain NASA did the math on their network traffic charges for both solutions and Amazon S3 came out cheaper, even with egress charges.

What *does* cost a ton are the S3 API charges. That surprised me when I accidentally found that out.

Please try to compare apples to apples next time.

Re:

[buss_error]

Lots of colo companies charge for both ingress and egress.

Yes, I know, since I was on the team for storage (Block, File, Object) at a large ISV with data centers around the world.

Network traffic isn't free.

Again, yes, I'm aware of that. Typically, the data centers I was working with used multiple OC-192's. Telco class MAE routers are not cheap.

On the bright side, AWS only charges for ingress.

I think you meant egress. Which is common because Object Stores are non-atomic. If you want to change an object, your first step is to download what's there (if you didn't keep a local copy), change it, delete what you have in the store, then upload t