At Amazon data centre, everything is aimed at AI

On 1,200 acres of cornfield in Indiana, Amazon is building one of the largest computers ever for work with AI start-up Anthropic, write Karen Weise in Seattle and Cade Metz in San Francisco

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A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Indiana, was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centres rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium.

Over the next several years, Amazon plans to build around 30 data centres at the site, packed with hundreds of thousands of specialised computer chips. With hundreds of thousands of miles of fibre connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence.

The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the AI start-up Anthropic, which aims to create an AI system that matches the human brain.

The complex — so large that it can be viewed completely only from high in the sky — is the first in a new generation of data centres being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters. Project Rainier will also include facilities in Mississippi and possibly other locations, like North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Project Rainier is Amazon's entry into a race by the technology industry to build data centres so large they would have been considered absurd just a few years ago. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is building a two-gigawatt data centre in Louisiana. OpenAI is erecting a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Texas and another, nearly as large, in the United Arab Emirates.