Amazon pledges to continue aggressive data centre expansion

Amazon[dot]com Inc’s cloud services chief says the company is aggressively expanding server farms globally and looking to boost access to the latest artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia Corp, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest seller of rented computing power and data storage, opened a cluster of data centres in Mexico earlier this year, AWS Chief Executive Officer Matt Garman said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The cloud division is also building out new facilities in Chile, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan, Garman said.

Amazon has said that its AI franchise is on pace to bring in multiple billions of dollars over the course of a full year. Garman said Friday that the figure “is AWS” and represents customer use of its on-demand AI services.

Like rivals Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google, Amazon is racing to boost its capacity to power artificial intelligence tasks. Garman said it was working with Nvidia to expand its stock of the leading AI chipmaker’s latest GB200 semiconductors, which are available for AWS customers to test.

“Demand is strong,” he said.

A longtime AWS engineering leader and later sales chief, Garman took the top job at AWS a year ago, replacing Adam Selipsky.

Garman said he’d welcome the chance to host OpenAI’s models on AWS. The AI startup’s models are powered by Microsoft servers, but OpenAI earlier this year won permission to explore other partnerships if Microsoft doesn’t want the business itself.

“We encourage all of our partners to be able to be available elsewhere,” Garman said. “I’d love for others to take that same tack.”

He said it would be “OK, too,” if Claude -- the AI model built by Amazon partner Anthropic -- wound up on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

“It’s great that Claude’s making their services available elsewhere, and we see the vast majority of that usage happening in AWS though,” Garman said.