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Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
- altcognito 3mo agoOh! Thank goodness! 138 megawatts, they might be able to support the air conditioning systems with that much power.
- catlikesshrimp 3mo agoAlso, they said "invested in" which is not the same as paid to add 138MW capacity.
- jakebol 3mo ago138 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 agoI'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 ago138 megawatts is how much the company is investing in a "carbon-free energy project in the state" - not the power usage of the datacenter.
- mkhpalm 3mo agoMy mistake. Hopefully its less than 3-400 megawatts because that is the power needed to get San Diego onto 100% ocean water desalination. Currently 3/4ths of San Diego's water comes from the Colorado. That would be a big deal for everybody else in the Southwest.
- mchusma 3mo agoThe reason desalination hasn't happened in california is because of political entities like the coastal commission, which blocked a desalination plant that would serve most of LA's water.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- thelonelyborg 3mo ago[flagged]
- AmazingEveryDay 3mo agoAll 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 agoIt’ll get used to generate an endless stream of AI slop short form videos to captivate viewers to watch more ads.
- cyanydeez 3mo agocommon now, think positive: local sex bots in your area waiting to chat
- ares623 3mo agoAds are the future. If you don't like them then you're a luddite.
- kibwen 3mo agoFrankly, 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 agoTell that to São Paulo.
- jrflowers 3mo agoLook everybody it’s 1670s London haberdasher Jonathon Holder!
- leptons 3mo agoThey'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.
- jasonlotito 3mo agoThat'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 agoHow so? Not seeing the connection.
- logankeenan 3mo agoData 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
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- stonogo 3mo agoFort Leonard Wood is a basic training base. It has no meaningful defenses.
- philajan 3mo agoI 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 agoIt’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 agoSo 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 agoIt'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 agoIf 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 agoAI works by responding to prompts. So if you’re dissatisfied with what it produces, consider a critique of its user.
- whattheheckheck 3mo agoSo much for agi... so glad we have more bs to work with in this industry
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoOfficial 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 agoI 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 agoAI'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 agoThink 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 agoMissouri 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 agoThe 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 agoOh, 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 agoIt'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 agoWhat 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 agoAre 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 ago60db 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 agoI guess this will become us-central-1?
- annagio_ 3mo agoAnother data center, another fall! whoho!! Let's go, more data center I guess.
- ch0wn 3mo ago[dead]