Amazon will spend up to $50B to beef up the U.S. government networks that power everything from espionage to drug discovery.
Amazon Web Services announced plans to add nearly 1.3 gigawatts worth of power for its network of servers purpose-built for government use. Construction on the project — details of which weren’t disclosed — is set to start next year.
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The shipping and cloud services behemoth said the investment marked a fundamental shift away from the high-performance computing infrastructure built for speed to models designed around artificial intelligence-accelerated discovery.
The new computing power will be deployed across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions networks — the systems used by the federal government to keep its data segregated from the transmission lines that power the traditional internet.
The upgrades will give the government access to Amazon’s AI model training and deployment platforms and access to Claude, the AI model from Amazon-backed Anthropic. It will also give the U.S. government the ability to use the latest computer chips built for AI by Nvidia to stay on the leading edge of development in the space.
“This investment will enable government agencies to accelerate discovery and decision-making across government missions,” Amazon said in a release. “By integrating simulation and modeling data with AI, agencies can achieve in hours what once took weeks or months through autonomous experimental steering and real-time feedback loops.”
The release highlighted how defense-related agencies could leverage the new AI-empowered tools to manage workflows that had required weeks of manual analysis to “generate response plans by processing satellite imagery, sensor data, and historical patterns at unprecedented scale.”
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A wide range of government agencies would benefit from the infrastructure upgrade, including teams working on cybersecurity, energy innovation, autonomous systems development and healthcare research, Amazon said.
Amazon became the government’s first purpose-built cloud provider in 2011 with the launch of AWS GovCloud. In 2014, it added a top-secret cloud platform, the first commercially available solution to be air gapped, a technical term meaning it is completely untethered from the public internet.
In 2017, Amazon launched systems that could handle all levels of government classification.
The explosion in demand for electrical and computing power generated by the rise of AI has become the key bottleneck for growth in the sector. Data center operators and investors are pouring billions of dollars into new development, which has fueled bubble fears for the as-yet unprofitable technology.
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