AWS unveils flurry of AI data center updates: 4 key takeaways
Amazon (AMZN) announced several changes to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers to better equip its infrastructure for the artificial intelligence (AI) era. AWS, Amazon's cloud business, unveiled several updates to its data center infrastructure to ensure it can meet customers' AI needs. Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley sits down with AWS vice president of infrastructure Prasad Kalyanaraman to discuss the announcements and what investors need to know about AWS' AI efforts. Kalyanaraman outlines four key focus areas of AWS' work: design simplification, power, cooling, and capacity. "We've done a ton of improvements in terms of simplification of our electrical and mechanical design that will improve the availability for our customers even more," he tells Yahoo Finance. "The second part of it is that generative AI requires a meaningful amount of power for these racks and for these chips, and we've been innovating on our power delivery design to these servers as well." "[The] third part is our cooling design," the AWS vice president says, adding, "We've innovated in such a way that we can retrofit our existing data centers for liquid cooling as well as air cooling. "Finally, our improvements in mechanical and electrical efficiency, to the tune of about 40% to 46% or so, has actually improved the amount of capacity we can deliver for our customers in the exact same data center." Ahead of Nvidia's (NVDA) official launch of its new AI chip, Blackwell, Kalyanaraman talks about AWS' ongoing partnership with Nvidia and how the latest chip fits into the company's AI push. "The latest set of chips from Nvidia, which are the Blackwell processors, do require liquid cooling, and so we've been innovating in a way such that we can run liquid cooling infrastructure in addition to air cooling infrastructure." To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination Overtime here. This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.
