Amazon announced on Monday that it would invest up to $50 billion to significantly expand its artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing capacity specifically for its United States government customers. This commitment represents one of the largest infrastructure pledges ever directed at the public sector cloud market.
The project, slated to commence groundwork in 2026, will introduce nearly 1.3 gigawatts (GW) of new AI and high-performance computing capability across the AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud regions. This expansion will be achieved through the development of new data centres equipped with highly advanced computing and networking systems. For context, one gigawatt of computing power is roughly sufficient to supply the average energy needs of around 750,000 US households.
“This investment removes the technology barriers that have held government back,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said.
AWS is already a key cloud provider to the US government, currently serving over 11,000 government agencies.
Tech corporations, including OpenAI, Alphabet, and Microsoft, are consistently pouring billions into establishing AI infrastructure, thereby escalating the demand for the computing power required to support these advanced services.
Amazon’s initiative is designed to provide federal agencies with enhanced access to a comprehensive suite of AWS AI services. These offerings encompass Amazon SageMaker for model training and customisation, Amazon Bedrock for the deployment of AI models and agents, and foundational models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude.
Amazon Data Center tally tops 900 amid AI frenzy
Amazon.com Inc.’s data center operation is much larger than commonly understood, totaling more than 900 facilities in more than 50 countries, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg and investigative website SourceMaterial.
Amazon Web Services is best known for sprawling data center hubs in Virginia and Oregon. But those sorts of enormous complexes, which the company owns or operates through long-term leases, don’t account for its full footprint. The cloud unit also stashes server racks in hundreds of so-called colocation facilities, renting space that as of last year provided about a fifth of the computing power at Amazon’s disposal, according to the documents.
Called “colos” in the industry, the rented data centers are typically sub-divided among different clients. The AWS presence in such facilities ranges from a few server racks in a dedicated room to most or all of enormous buildings in places like Frankfurt and Tokyo, the documents show.
