Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
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* >>Amazon said Thursday that revenue growth in its cloud-computing unit slowed in the third quarter to 27.5%.*
27.5%. It is lower that their previous 33% growth over the past few years, but at the current size of AWS growing 27.5% is still ridiculously good. To put this in perspective, if AWS continues to grow at 33% in 2022 and 2023. Then the whole 2023 33% growth alone, would equal to the size of the entire AWS in 2018. It is not the first time Amazon said they are limited by how fast they are building out Datacenter and getting hardware resources ready.
That was in 2022. They nearly double their 2018 size alone in a single year.
I don't understand back then. I still can't get my head around it now. With or without AI. With AI the number and scale just grows beyond my imagination. CPU power per socket or per Rack have increased every single year. What used to take 10 racks could now be replaced by 1. I would have expected slowly replacing old Rack to newer ones would have been enough with slower Datacenter growth. That is not to mention software have gotten faster and efficient over the years. JVM, PHP, Ruby, C, Database etc over the past 10 - 15 years.
Instead we keep growing, not only that; AI have shown they seems to have infinite appetite for computing resources. I know this is classic Jevons Paradox but the scale [2]. It is mind boggling numbers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33384628
[2] I remember the last time I had scale issues was I can't compute in my head how Apple will be a trillion dollar company by 2020. That was written on Appleinsider in ~2012. We now have multiple trillions dollar companies. The TAM of some of these market continue to amaze me.
The basic play here is to get companies to fire people and adapt internal processes to the current heavily subsidized AI farms, and then jack the rates once the switching costs become untenable ... particularly if they can get a huge percentage of human programmers to quit the industry.
This is effectively "dumping" in the economic sense.
Some states don't need a license for low-voltage work, so you might be able to do data wiring.
There's a variety of roles. Security, electricians, HVAC engineers, generally some type of site foreman-ask role, logistics (depending on the size of the place), and technicians (for a lack of a better word, feels like every place calls them something different). There's a variety of roles that often float between sites or oversee many sites, depending again on the scale of the place. AWS is huge. Bigger than you're imagining, so there's quite a few levels deep and include real estate folks as well as construction roles. If you go and look at job postings, you'll even see roles for nuclear engineers at some companies.
But generally what you're talking about here are what I'm calling the technicians. They're responsible for wheeling racks into place (depending on the company they may also be responsible for unloading the trucks). Cabling is nearly always outsourced these days (though not the design of the cables), so rolling a rack into place generally involves securing it to the floor and connecting power, data, and more often than not now-a-days liquid cooling.
The other part of their job is "troubleshooting" failed hardware. Again, really depends on the company. Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up. I'm sure there are some great places to be a tech where you get to rip apart servers and bust out the multimeter, that to my understanding is not how the hyperscalers who actually hyper-scale do it.
There's some cleaning, parts management, destroying broken hard drives, shoveling snow off the roof (no lie), and a variety of other odd tasks.
If you ever have the opportunity to check out one of those places it can be a riot and a real eye opener. Depends again on the company though, some of those places have insane security (metal detectors, badge+pin, turnstile door procedures) which make visits super un-fun if they're even allowed outside of legit business reasons. Other companies... well I'm glad that's not where I store my data.
Back "in the day" (2005 give or take a handful of years) techs would often write their own automation and even build some simple services.
And yes, the jobs don't pay particularly well depending upon what it is. Electricians and such command decent wages, but the security guards and techs don't make crazy amounts. I think folks doing contract cabling can come out ahead.
Anyhow, SWEs are wildly insulated from the realities of what things look like on the ground. Maybe that's a good thing, IDK.
You'll especially be in luck if your company is an old and has a mainframe or two. Those are incredible to behold. Masterful engineering.
Very true. I've heard stories of how technicians struggle with friends/family perceptions here. Since a lot of these datacenters are in rural communities, they are perceived as being technical wizards to be working there. But in reality they are doing as you say - just following a preprogrammed script with very little scope for any sort of creative problem solving.
Outside of construction I don't believe datacenters employ many people locally.
It would be rather silly is a multi-billion dollar investment went down because, for some reason, admins couldn't remote in.
Anybody working in even classic datacenter physical ops already knows how to plug a KVM with a cell modem into a box to let the engineers remote in. That's assuming the racks aren't already built to support this natively these days.
Come on, this is the industry that is going gangbusters on the fetish of mass unemployment and deskilling, you don't think they're doing everything they can to have to only hire a few local bodies at minimum wage to basically pull a bad rack out and slot a new spare in?
There are little to no SWEs in a large AWS datacenter.
I used to do SWE. Early in my career I realized that DCO/DCE was not only an entire discipline unto itself, but that the rest of the "team" looked down on it because it required physical labor. Perfect, I don't feel like I've done Real Work unless I do something in the physical world. Hence my DCE jobs. I would not be able to do SWE today.
But I'll tell you this: way more than once I've had a cocky new hire from the HFT I work at wither under simple tasks: Please re-balance the load across all phases of these PDUs. Please groom & remove dead cables from wherever. But you don't have time to figure it out on the fly. You have an hour to have it DONE.
Anyway, I think your intuition serves you well. :)
7 million dollars is peanuts for amazon btw
(from Les Misérables)
While popups and bad ad practices have always been a problem, it's sad to see that they became so bad that the response to them is to paygate web content. More and more sites are locked behind paywalls.
We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.
I think it will greatly benefit politics in the US to stop looking at this tension between government services and private services as all or nothing and start thinking about what is most beneficial to the public economically.
Saying people with higher income bought for convenience is understating the situation. If you needed timely access to books or newspapers that were in high demand you often had to buy out of necessity.
I'm not sure how a similar thing would work the internet. How do you limit the number of people that can use the free version? If you don't the people who could pay largely won't.
The only idea I've heard that might work is to just make it free for everyone, but put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with use, and divvy up that tax to the sites based on their traffic.
That then raises questions like what to tax and how to divvy it up since simply dividing it proportionally to traffic probably would not work well (Richard Stallman has suggesed such a system, with the split based on the cube root of popularity).
I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals.
Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it.
Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design.
What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
The US was founded on Christian principles. Even the chief author of the constitution separated church and state for the express purpose of spreading the gospels of Jesus. There is the source of morality.
And then since the mid 20th century this stronghold of morality was by the hidden architects of human affairs allowed to diminish by the corruption of the monetary system. The constitution only allows for the federal government to mint silver and gold coins, but over a series of events (starting with the sinking of the Titanic, believe it or not) the power to print money became centralized and co-opted by the global banking elites, and now everything that gets in the way is either purchased or neutralized.
Some of the media I cited like 1984 or the Terminator series were as a warning by moral men. It's not surprising that we failed to heed these warnings against the god of money, at least temporarily. Others like Back to the Future 2 (Biff == Trump), or the Simpsons, are predictive programming leaks from mortal architects.
What's more surprising to me is the myopic greed of those who choose the dark side willingly despite the forewarned consequences as if all of this wasn't already written about by higher powers, heavenly and earthly. We're living in biblical times whether you agree with it or not. They've been planning for global depopulation since the 60's w/ the World3 simulator. We just lived through the man-made pandemic from the Wuhan lab ala EcoHealth funded by Fauci, and I'm guessing it'll never bother most readers here that he's still not in jail because y'all neither have the attention span nor resources to learn the truth anymore because you keep scrolling censored sources.
Which reminds me... Utopia (the UK version), more predictive programming. It's just two seasons, I suggest everyone watch it to get a sense of what I mean by predictive programming. In one scene you'll even find the masonic square and compass. In the US version they even added Bill Gates as a character, just to hammer it home.
Thing is, way too many conspiracy theories, it would seem, are just plain facts (or at least very close to the truth if not 100% perfectly accurate in all the details)
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
Dude wrote an essay around infrasound being pseudoscience and chose to ignore the obvious, audible, constant hum.
Which is what's happening again.
Assume every post here is automatically anti something and don't engage. Your mental health isn't worth it.
20 years ago even with automation etc you needed armies of people to make something work. It was more of a transformation of the type of work. Look at the amount of work Amazon as a company has created. It changed how people buy stuff etc, but behind the scenes there is always human workforce, to deliver, to invent the recommendation algorithms, to package the items, etc (although here there is heavy automation).
Now the idea is that we need AI so we can replace humans, so "people can spend more time on what they like to do". Which is what, searching for jobs on LinkedIn?
Well at least you're planning to have a very healthy population of enslaved serfs. I'm sure they'll appreciate all you've done for them.
This also applies within companies. You can get temporary lucky with a CEO that isn't accountable to anyone, but then that brings sycophancy, leading to degraded decisions. It's how it always works.
So it's very clear cut, because you are offering a trade that cannot actually happen in practice. The economic growth will turn into zero sum status games, like it always has.
This is too unrealistic a statement. Democracy in the US has had some destruction wrought on it since the media started believing that activism and opinion journalism were more important than facts, and that change is the goal of journalism. That's a massive blow to democracy - far greater than anything happening today. We are living in its results.
> Autocracies are, in practice, inefficient messes that put loyalty ahead of competency, so one cannot really get prosperity in exchange for no representation.
This is totally wrong - autocracies can be extremely efficient. Mussolini made the trains run on time. That is one of the few problems the autocracies don't have, unless their bureaucracy is genuinely so inefficient it can't carry out the autocrat's will.
All government options and private companies can definitely reward loyalty over competence.
—Sparta
Pretty sure that problem is not limited by computer power
Oligarchs (trillionares and billionaires as they get called in the US) are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
Explain _why_.
Thus, economic inequality leads to backslide of democracy:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-de...
Just because capital is happy to take advantage our current incompetent authoritarian populist administration doesn't doesn't mean they don't prefer predictable technocrats in charge. Trump was outspent during all of his campaigns.
Most people can't really understand the numbers in question due to their size. It's like that picture of 1 million dollars in $100's stacked up on a pallet, then 1 billion and 1 trillion. But instead of worthless paper, it is consuming huge swaths of the limited fresh water on the planet, creating the largest natural gas power plants in the world, consuming huge swaths of the fundamental foundry and fab processes that our entire technological society relies upon ...
And the "literally solving unsolved math problems"... Who cares, how will knowing the answer to that math problem solve our global climate disaster from taking out modern human technologies civilization? It's not!
We'll be able to increase chip capacity eventually, and we're also still doing pretty well at clean energy conversion. Eventually we'll get there.
I'm much less pessimistic about this.
There is LOTS of reporting about this. One example:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/microsof...
Again, I ask, where are you getting the 60-80% number?
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/closed-loop-co...
I wasn't born yesterday dude, it's obvious you're deflecting. You cited a sloptistic generated by an LLM. Take the L.
When these days centers say they use (x) MW/GW, that is all turning into heat, with some additional (%) on top for inefficiencies.
And don't forget, they are literally making the largest natural gas power plants. Which in turn generate a fuck ton of heat to make the power because they burn gas to heat water to turn it into steam to turn a turbine... Which in itself is another +30%-60% of heat on top of what ever number they quote for power because of the inefficiencies.
So for every MW, it's really 1.3-1.6MW of heating, then they use that 1 MW to power the cooling systems or the server clusters. So for every 1MW of power use, it's on the order of 2.3-2.6x of heat generated.
Again, the scale is the issue at hand. These data centers are consuming more supplies and power for something that is not necessary to human existence
What?
Like the water situation east of the rockies has been pretty bad... It just ain't the desert that you get over in California or Arizona
Maybe "drought" doesn't mean what I think it means. In this case, I amend my comment to say "There's clearly lots of water there" instead of "drought."
AI data centers dwarf any previous data centers you know about
It is extremely hard to imagine that the world where this amount of money going into actual research tools and researchers wouldn’t give vastly better results.
Building a nuclear powered shovel to dig a grave would work but it doesn’t mean it is a sensible thing to do
Because it’s easy. It’s free to post internet comments. The doomers have the lowest effort take so they’re very prominent. People doing things are too busy doing things to post doomer comments.
If only...
I do believe that access to commercial AI should be regulated, heavily taxed, and controlled just as much as access to dangerous chemicals and weapons. Only this way the best AI models are more likely to indeed be used for frugal purposes (sadly, however, including ads).
However, the vast majority of people will rely on commercial AI models.
"API call to a company that routed it to a Chinese model? Believe it or not, jail."
Today it will be used to power AI girlfriends.
There are some sly word games happening there.
Although to be fair, it does roll off the tongue better than "Project Jeff Wants Another Yacht".
The AWS status page still shows UAE as disrupted https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
For 6–10 gigawatt data centers I consider what else that amount of power could support. At current desalination efficiencies, 6 gigawatts of continuous power could produce roughly 11–14 million acre-feet of freshwater per year, comparable to the historical annual flow of the Colorado River.
So a single 6 GW power supply could theoretically generate enough freshwater to replace most or all of the Colorado River's annual flow. The famous river that is stretched thin but supports up to around 45 million people from Denver all the way to San Diego and even Mexico. So the comparison is we can have a single AI datacenter or a drought-proof water supply for a region constantly under drought restrictions.
I'm not saying don't build the other dozen or so 6 to 10 gigawatt data centers everybody keeps talking about. I'm just saying maybe we can do one less of those and use some of that power to support ocean water desalination instead.
Noise pollution is a serious issue and is second behind air pollution among environmental health risks.