Amazon pledges up to $65 billion to expand AI, supercomputing for US government
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The US federal government is seeking to develop tailored AI solutions and drive cost savings by leveraging AWS’ dedicated and expanded capacity.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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WASHINGTON – Amazon.com said on Nov 24 that it would invest up to US$50 billion (S$65 billion) to expand artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing capabilities for Amazon Web Services (AWS) US government customers, in one of the largest cloud infrastructure commitments targeted at the public sector.
The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of AI and high-performance computing capacity across the AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret and AWS GovCloud regions by building data centres equipped with advanced compute and networking technologies.
AWS cloud regions for the US government are based on increasing levels of data sensitivity. The cloud unit currently serves more than 11,000 US government agencies.
“While Amazon still leads the cloud market, it has lost ground on AI-related cloud growth as Google and Oracle speed up, making large-scale infrastructure commitments necessary strategies,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said.
Tech companies, including OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft, are pouring billions of dollars into developing AI infrastructure
One gigawatt of computing power is roughly enough to power about 750,000 US households on average.
AWS chief executive Matt Garman said: “This investment removes the technology barriers that have held (the) government back.”
Amazon did not disclose a timeline for the spending.
Under the latest initiative, federal agencies will gain access to AWS’ comprehensive suite of AI services, including Amazon SageMaker for model training and customisation, Amazon Bedrock for deploying models and agents, as well as foundation models such as Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude.
The federal government is seeking to develop tailored AI solutions and drive cost savings by leveraging AWS’ dedicated and expanded capacity.
The US is in an AI arms race with China and will significantly increase its AI compute capacity to maintain its lead, D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. REUTERS
