6 ms·

Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri

121 points by thelonelyborg 3mo ago

thelonelyborg 3mo ago
[flagged]
AmazingEveryDay 3mo 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.
- graphime 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  It’ll get used to generate an endless stream of AI slop short form videos to captivate viewers to watch more ads.
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  common now, think positive: local sex bots in your area waiting to chat
- ares623 3mo ago
  Ads are the future. If you don't like them then you're a luddite.
  - kibwen 3mo 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 3mo ago
    Tell that to São Paulo.
  - jrflowers 3mo ago
    Look everybody it’s 1670s London haberdasher Jonathon Holder!
  - leptons 3mo 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 3mo ago
  It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!
  - winrid 3mo ago
    Which does technically distribute wealth to thousands of people
  - rcpt 3mo ago
    Have you considered becoming a shareholder?
- ddxv 3mo 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.
  - Gigachad 3mo 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.
    - throwway120385 3mo ago
      Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.
      - Schiendelman 3mo ago
        The hard part is that when you have a few companies competing to do something, they very quickly start doing it for less money than government does because they innovate to compete with each other. You can take a snapshot in time and pretend cutting 20% off the top is worth it, but by the time you do the political organization you've usually lost the plot. Plus all of the mechanics of taxation and bureaucracy are usually more expensive…
- protocolture 3mo 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.
- tengbretson 3mo 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?
  - halestock 3mo 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.
    - fooster 3mo ago
      The number of doomers and luddites with extremely hyperbolic views on a site for tech entrepreneurs is wild.
      - jkwn 3mo ago
        You have no frame of reference, Donny. I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals. Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it. Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design. What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
        tengbretson 3mo ago
        You have to admit-- it is interesting that all of this media, that was made during a time when there were standards and morals, has painted such a clear picture of what you now expect life to be like.
- kylehotchkiss 3mo ago
  Or generate political slops to rile up older people
- laughing_man 3mo 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 3mo 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.
    - icepush 3mo ago
      The plan was always to get acquired by Google and then killed off two years later!
    - laughing_man 3mo ago
      It really does have that 1998 feel to it.
- brunoborges 3mo 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-issue 3mo 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?
    - brunoborges 3mo ago
      If you get caught with illegal guns and illegal chemicals, well... there are consequences. Bad actors will always find a way, at the risk of getting caught. However, the vast majority of people will rely on commercial AI models.
      - weird-eye-issue 3mo ago
        Wait, so now you are saying that consumption of models that fall outside of the tax jurisdiction would be illegal?? What other goods or services have this sort of precedent? "API call to a company that routed it to a Chinese model? Believe it or not, jail."
- jmalicki 3mo ago
  Five years ago it would be to serve ads. Today it will be used to power AI girlfriends.
altcognito 3mo ago
Oh! Thank goodness! 138 megawatts, they might be able to support the air conditioning systems with that much power.
- catlikesshrimp 3mo ago
  Also, they said "invested in" which is not the same as paid to add 138MW capacity.
  - jakebol 3mo 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.
- mkhpalm 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
  How so? Not seeing the connection.
  - logankeenan 3mo 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 https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - stonogo 3mo ago
      Fort Leonard Wood is a basic training base. It has no meaningful defenses.
- philajan 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
mrcwinn 3mo ago
AI works by responding to prompts. So if you’re dissatisfied with what it produces, consider a critique of its user.
- whattheheckheck 3mo ago
  So much for agi... so glad we have more bs to work with in this industry
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Official post: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-data-center-missouri-new-jobs https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-data-ce...
ksec 3mo 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 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
Missouri ratepayers will be able to verify Amazon's promise not to pass on the datacenter's costs on their monthly electricity bills!
- flanked-evergl 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tenuousemphasis 3mo ago
    >It's so retarded. Vote for a government that makes it impossible to build more electricity generation capacity, then cry when electricity prices go up. What the absolute fuck are you talking about? Missouri is solidly Republican run at the state level and they are very friendly to corporations.
    - VintageCool 3mo ago
      The Grain Belt Express has been in limbo for 15 years now, despite backing from Invenergy. It has recently taken hits from President Trump, Senator Hawley, and Missouri's AG. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/07/27/plans-for-a-new-us-wind-energy-superhighway-persist-despite-new-hurdles/ https://cleantechnica.com/2025/07/27/plans-for-a-new-us-wind...
      - TheScaryOne 3mo ago
        Oh, you see, that's wind energy. No one can charge for the wind, so they don't like it. You can't build big expensive wind drilling machines and keep big vats of wind for bad days.
jimt1234 3mo ago
It's a few years old, but sorta related: https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor-vows-criminal-prosecution-of-reporter-who-found-flaw-in-state-website/ https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor...
dyauspitr 3mo 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 3mo 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 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.
  - dyauspitr 3mo ago
    60db outside is like 35-45 indoors which is considered very quiet, almost silent.
znpy 3mo ago
> Amazon is also committing over $7 million in direct community contributions 7 million dollars is peanuts for amazon btw
- sseagull 3mo ago
  “There is Mr. Geborand, buying a bit of paradise for one penny.” (from Les Misérables)
somelamer567 3mo 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 3mo ago
I guess this will become us-central-1?
annagio_ 3mo ago
Another data center, another fall! whoho!! Let's go, more data center I guess.
ch0wn 3mo ago
[dead]

121 points by thelonelyborg 3mo ago

[flagged]

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.

graphime 3mo ago
[flagged]
Gigachad 3mo ago
It’ll get used to generate an endless stream of AI slop short form videos to captivate viewers to watch more ads.
cyanydeez 3mo ago
common now, think positive: local sex bots in your area waiting to chat
ares623 3mo ago
Ads are the future. If you don't like them then you're a luddite.
- kibwen 3mo 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 3mo ago
  Tell that to São Paulo.
- jrflowers 3mo ago
  Look everybody it’s 1670s London haberdasher Jonathon Holder!
- leptons 3mo 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 3mo ago
It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!
- winrid 3mo ago
  Which does technically distribute wealth to thousands of people
- rcpt 3mo ago
  Have you considered becoming a shareholder?
ddxv 3mo 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.
- Gigachad 3mo 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.
  - throwway120385 3mo ago
    Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.
    - Schiendelman 3mo ago
      The hard part is that when you have a few companies competing to do something, they very quickly start doing it for less money than government does because they innovate to compete with each other. You can take a snapshot in time and pretend cutting 20% off the top is worth it, but by the time you do the political organization you've usually lost the plot. Plus all of the mechanics of taxation and bureaucracy are usually more expensive…
protocolture 3mo 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.
tengbretson 3mo 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?
- halestock 3mo 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.
  - fooster 3mo ago
    The number of doomers and luddites with extremely hyperbolic views on a site for tech entrepreneurs is wild.
    - jkwn 3mo ago
      You have no frame of reference, Donny. I'm guessing you have no conception of what the world used to be like before 9/11. Back then, the news was reported, and people got outraged at things. Sure, there was injustice then too, and all wars are a racket, but there were still standards of morals. Today, you have a level of corruption in all things that is beyond the imagination, out in the open; and it is out in the open because the powers that be have been using technology to silence dissent and cancel everyone who speaks out against it. Those with eyes to see see very clearly where the times are headed; it's a cross between 1984, Minority Report, the Hunger Games, and Back to the Future 2, and the Terminator series. If you don't see it coming, don't know what to tell ya. It's already here, but you don't see it in your feed by design. What's wild is how long it took for HN to wake up. You're the straggler.
      - tengbretson 3mo ago
        You have to admit-- it is interesting that all of this media, that was made during a time when there were standards and morals, has painted such a clear picture of what you now expect life to be like.
kylehotchkiss 3mo ago
Or generate political slops to rile up older people
laughing_man 3mo 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 3mo 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.
  - icepush 3mo ago
    The plan was always to get acquired by Google and then killed off two years later!
  - laughing_man 3mo ago
    It really does have that 1998 feel to it.
brunoborges 3mo 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-issue 3mo 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?
  - brunoborges 3mo ago
    If you get caught with illegal guns and illegal chemicals, well... there are consequences. Bad actors will always find a way, at the risk of getting caught. However, the vast majority of people will rely on commercial AI models.
    - weird-eye-issue 3mo ago
      Wait, so now you are saying that consumption of models that fall outside of the tax jurisdiction would be illegal?? What other goods or services have this sort of precedent? "API call to a company that routed it to a Chinese model? Believe it or not, jail."
jmalicki 3mo ago
Five years ago it would be to serve ads. Today it will be used to power AI girlfriends.

altcognito 3mo ago

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

catlikesshrimp 3mo ago
Also, they said "invested in" which is not the same as paid to add 138MW capacity.
- jakebol 3mo 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.
mkhpalm 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
How so? Not seeing the connection.
- logankeenan 3mo 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 https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - stonogo 3mo ago
    Fort Leonard Wood is a basic training base. It has no meaningful defenses.
philajan 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.

mrcwinn 3mo ago

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

whattheheckheck 3mo ago
So much for agi... so glad we have more bs to work with in this industry

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

Official post: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-data-center-missouri-new-jobs https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-data-ce...

ksec 3mo 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 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago

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

flanked-evergl 3mo ago
[flagged]
- tenuousemphasis 3mo ago
  >It's so retarded. Vote for a government that makes it impossible to build more electricity generation capacity, then cry when electricity prices go up. What the absolute fuck are you talking about? Missouri is solidly Republican run at the state level and they are very friendly to corporations.
  - VintageCool 3mo ago
    The Grain Belt Express has been in limbo for 15 years now, despite backing from Invenergy. It has recently taken hits from President Trump, Senator Hawley, and Missouri's AG. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/07/27/plans-for-a-new-us-wind-energy-superhighway-persist-despite-new-hurdles/ https://cleantechnica.com/2025/07/27/plans-for-a-new-us-wind...
    - TheScaryOne 3mo ago
      Oh, you see, that's wind energy. No one can charge for the wind, so they don't like it. You can't build big expensive wind drilling machines and keep big vats of wind for bad days.

jimt1234 3mo ago

It's a few years old, but sorta related: https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor-vows-criminal-prosecution-of-reporter-who-found-flaw-in-state-website/ https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor...

dyauspitr 3mo 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 3mo 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 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.
- dyauspitr 3mo ago
  60db outside is like 35-45 indoors which is considered very quiet, almost silent.

znpy 3mo ago

> Amazon is also committing over $7 million in direct community contributions 7 million dollars is peanuts for amazon btw

sseagull 3mo ago
“There is Mr. Geborand, buying a bit of paradise for one penny.” (from Les Misérables)

somelamer567 3mo 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 3mo ago

I guess this will become us-central-1?

annagio_ 3mo ago

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

ch0wn 3mo ago

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