Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri

https://www.narracomm.com/amazon-announces-multibillion-dollar-data-center-in-missouri/

by thelonelyborg • 1 month ago

121 138 1 month ago

All the compute being built out is very impressive and it's nice to think it could be used to further science, further our understanding, just in some way for the greater good. But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.

Gigachad2• 1 month ago

It’ll get used to generate an endless stream of AI slop short form videos to captivate viewers to watch more ads.

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

common now, think positive: local sex bots in your area waiting to chat

ares623• 1 month ago

Ads are the future. If you don't like them then you're a luddite.

kibwen• 1 month ago

Frankly, it should be a crime, a felony even, to purchase something if you haven't seen an ad for it beforehand. Think of the poor middlemen!

user3939382• 1 month ago

Tell that to São Paulo.

jrflowers• 1 month ago

Look everybody it’s 1670s London haberdasher Jonathon Holder!

leptons2• 1 month ago

They're going to need quite a lot more ads to try to sell stuff to people who don't have jobs anymore because of all the datacenters built for AI.

tdb7893• 1 month ago

It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!

winrid• 1 month ago

Which does technically distribute wealth to thousands of people

rcpt3• 1 month ago

Have you considered becoming a shareholder?

ddxv• 1 month ago

Unpopular take I know. But ads are a source of revenue for much of the free and open internet. The alternatives are paid features that are a regressive tax on poorer people who can't afford them or fork up larger amounts of their discretionary budget.

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.

Gigachad2• 1 month ago

Ads create a terribly perverse incentive to increase users viewing time on platforms. It's the whole reason most of the internet has become so horrible. My email provider doesn't try to drive up my engagement because they have no incentive for me to use the product more than I naturally want to. I'd also be willing to bet that the current ad funded system ends up costing the average person more than just paying for services when they get influenced to buy the things in the ads. That's the whole point of advertising after all.

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.

protocolture2• 1 month ago

Amazons business is just cloud services tbh. I dont know what Amazons customer base looks like in aggregate but I bet its more interesting than just ads.

tengbretson3• 1 month ago

In the 10 years prior to like 2023, any new large scale data center build-out was explicitly for serving more ads. Meanwhile, now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?

halestock2• 1 month ago

Because it's pretty evident that all these data centers are primarily intended to eliminate jobs and make more trillionaires and destroy democracy, and the positive stuff (like solving unsolved math problems) doesn't remotely justify that.

doctorwho428• 1 month ago

The sheer size of and resource consumption to build and operate them.

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!

dlev_pika• 1 month ago

How much of the total pie of resources consumed is ‘solving math models’, really?

viccis• 1 month ago

Because we can learn?

ozgrakkurt• 1 month ago

that's literally solving unsolved math problems,

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

mulmen• 1 month ago

now that we have a new tech that's literally solving unsolved math problems, we're suddenly doomers. Why?

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.

thrance• 1 month ago

We saw what happened to the early optimism of the internet era, what corporations made of it. There's no reason to believe this time will be different. Trust me, they are not building these data centers to solve math problems.

kylehotchkiss• 1 month ago

Or generate political slops to rile up older people

laughing_man2• 1 month ago

That's what pays the bills. You wouldn't expect someone to spend this kind of money without a way to make it back (and then some).

Arainach• 1 month ago

Most of the tech startup ecosystem for the last 20 years has been spending crazy money without a clear plan for how to make it back.

brunoborges2• 1 month ago

But I think mostly it will be used to serve ads.

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).

weird-eye-issue2• 1 month ago

Wouldn't that just incentivize more consumption of models that fall outside of the jurisdiction of whatever you are proposing would be in charge of taxing these so-called best AI models?

jmalicki• 1 month ago

Five years ago it would be to serve ads.

Today it will be used to power AI girlfriends.

altcognito• 1 month ago

Oh! Thank goodness! 138 megawatts, they might be able to support the air conditioning systems with that much power.

catlikesshrimp• 1 month ago

Also, they said "invested in" which is not the same as paid to add 138MW capacity.

jakebol• 1 month ago

138 MW is also nameplate capacity multiply that by effective utilization rate for ex solar (~20%) and it’s meaningless compared to the scale of the project.

mkhpalm2• 1 month ago

I'm relieved to hear it's 138 megawatts instead of 6 to 10 gigawatts we keep hearing about elsewhere.

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.

hooo• 1 month ago

138 megawatts is how much the company is investing in a "carbon-free energy project in the state" - not the power usage of the datacenter.

jasonlotito• 1 month ago

That's not far from St. Louis and Fort Leonard Wood, a hub for basic training among other things. I wonder if that had any impact in the location.

shermantanktop• 1 month ago

How so? Not seeing the connection.

logankeenan• 1 month ago

Data centers are critical infrastructure and having them near military bases could be seen as a security benefit.

The AWS status page still shows UAE as disrupted https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

philajan• 1 month ago

I imagined the location has to do with the nearby Callaway Nuclear power plant, and the solar projects that Ameren have been putting up in Montgomery County for the past few years.

michaelsbradley• 1 month ago

It’s about 80 miles from the city proper, out in the middle of nowhere essentially, so unlikely to employ anyone that actually lives in St. Louis.

wincy• 1 month ago

So what does one of these full time data center jobs look like, day to day? If I’m a software engineer I feel like I’d have to move and get a pay decrease to actually work at one of these? I mean until AI finally puts me out of a job. I guess I wouldn’t really be qualified to work one of these jobs?

cyberax• 1 month ago

It's not easy, actually. You will likely need to be a licensed electrician or a licensed plumber. Both occupations require around 4000 hours of apprenticeship.

Some states don't need a license for low-voltage work, so you might be able to do data wiring.

RijilV• 1 month ago

If you've never had an opportunity to spend time in a datacenter as a software developer, that's unfortunate but also far too common. What things look like on the inside vary company to company. Generally you're in an OSHA-abiding environment, so safety shoes, ear and eye protection, sometimes gloves.

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.

nunez• 1 month ago

Not the poster, but I highly recommend checking out your company's data center if you can (and if your company has one). Nothing like seeing where your apps or data actually land (and the physical security put in place to protect them)

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.

martinpw• 1 month ago

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.

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.

fc417fc802• 1 month ago

Why would a datacenter employ an on site software engineer though? Anyway amazon already has plenty of those in house.

Outside of construction I don't believe datacenters employ many people locally.

JumpCrisscross• 1 month ago

Why would a datacenter employ an on site software engineer though?

It would be rather silly is a multi-billion dollar investment went down because, for some reason, admins couldn't remote in.

protocolture2• 1 month ago

The blokes I meet who work 8x5 from a data center tend to spend their days installing hardware, deinstalling hardware, providing remote hands (usually cabling, sometimes console access)building racks, managing power supplies and maintaining asset registers. And escorting idiots like me around when things get technical.

mlrtime• 1 month ago

To build one or work in one after it's built?

There are little to no SWEs in a large AWS datacenter.

Henchman21• 1 month ago

You're likely unqualified. You'll be competing against a pool of people who are qualified and have worked these jobs.

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. :)

mrcwinn• 1 month ago

AI works by responding to prompts. So if you’re dissatisfied with what it produces, consider a critique of its user.

whattheheckheck• 1 month ago

So much for agi... so glad we have more bs to work with in this industry

ChrisArchitect• 1 month ago

Official post: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-data-ce...

ksec• 1 month ago

I wrote below in 2022 on HN [1] when everyone was panicking about AWS growth slowing down.

* >>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.

AtlasBarfed• 1 month ago

AI's appetite for computation scales with the willingness of their funders to provide heavily discounted tokens to the general public.

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.

y2244• 1 month ago

Think the basic play is to IPO or be acquired so investors make their 10x and someone else deals with the enshittification later

N_Lens• 1 month ago

Missouri ratepayers will be able to verify Amazon's promise not to pass on the datacenter's costs on their monthly electricity bills!

jimt1234• 1 month ago

It's a few years old, but sorta related: https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor...

dyauspitr2• 1 month ago

What a refreshing change from a post like this on Reddit. It would be hysterics like they’re emptying lakes and using electricity (gasp!) and if you get really close it’s 60db (!!) loud. I only wish we had a competent administration at this point that would put in clever laws like requiring data centers to build out accompanying solar+battery buildouts to power themselves or something.

duskdozer• 1 month ago

Are you suggesting 60db is is acceptably quiet? It is well above the thresholds for sleep disturbance, negative health consequences, and in line with that of "[extreme irritation]". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise

Noise pollution is a serious issue and is second behind air pollution among environmental health risks.

dyauspitr2• 1 month ago

60db outside is like 35-45 indoors which is considered very quiet, almost silent.

znpy• 1 month ago

Amazon is also committing over $7 million in direct community contributions

7 million dollars is peanuts for amazon btw

sseagull• 1 month ago

“There is Mr. Geborand, buying a bit of paradise for one penny.”

(from Les Misérables)

somelamer567• 1 month ago

"Project Green"

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".

opjjf• 1 month ago

I guess this will become us-central-1?

annagio_• 1 month ago

Another data center, another fall! whoho!! Let's go, more data center I guess.

Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri

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