Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how AWS’s $20 billion investment in Pennsylvania is igniting the AI industrialization of America.
Highlights
00:15 — There’s an AI reindustrialization. AWS and Amazon intend to invest about $20 billion in the state of Pennsylvania, including a series of data centers. One of those data centers is going to be located in the northeast section called Luzerne County, which for 200 years has been part of what’s known as the interstate coal region in Pennsylvania.
01:11 — Here you have what was once one of the most valuable sources of energy for the Industrial Revolution in the United States and other parts of the world. Now, a couple of hundred years later, it’s going to become a source of a new type of energy — in the form of data and AI — that is going to transform how businesses around the world operate.
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02:26 — In a fairly detailed article we’ll be posting later, I’ve got lots of ideas about that and where these point forward, and details about what’s taking place here with these data centers. It’s part of a $20 billion investment that AWS is making in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, including these data centers.
03:01 — One of the big issues that comes out of this is: we’ve seen change — huge change — take place, driven in large part by technology over the last 10–15 years. We’ve never seen anything though of quite the extent and pace of what we’re seeing today. And I do think it’s incumbent on all business leaders to think very hard about this.
04:22 — There’s a choice to be made here. Do we stick with the industries and the approaches of the past that have gotten us to this point, or do we lean in? “Where are my company, my industry, and my customers going to be three, four, five years from now? And how do I ensure that I’m making progress right along, keeping in stride with them here, as the AI revolution takes hold?”
