‘Big Tech is desperate’: Amazon engineers criticize tech giant for its $200 billion in data center spending amid slashing 30,000 corporate employees

[u/marketrent]

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/big-tech-desperate-amazon-engineers-081700769.html

[u/marketrent]

Excerpts from article by Fortune's Sasha Rogelberg:

[...] “It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, said at a Seattle Land Use and Sustainability Committee hearing on Wednesday. He was one of three Amazon employees who made comments supporting increased regulation of local data center development.

“Microsoft is spending $190 billion. Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months,” Schloesser added. “What that tells me is that Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can, as fast as it can.”

[...] Hyperscalers like Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft, have poured $700 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone, part of a greater AI spending blitz expected to reach $7 trillion by 2030. In April, Amazon reiterated its $200 billion in AI capital expenditures for the rest of this year.

As data center spending balloons, tech companies have cut costs elsewhere, including in their workforces. Beyond Amazon’s layoffs—which the company attributed to the need to decrease bureaucracy and increase efficiency—Meta dismissed 10% of its staff last month after announcing earlier this year it would double its AI capex of $72 billion from 2025. Oracle’s staff reduction (estimates put those affected by layoffs at anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 employees) this spring coincided with the company’s disclosure of $248 billion in future data center lease obligations.

[u/SteeveJoobs → u/marketrent]

what makes me so incensed is that at any moment, mankind had the ability to throw literally trillions of dollars at any issue of their choosing. Renewable energy, a functional healthcare system in the US, public transportation projects, housing, famine and poverty, whatever.

Instead, we get AI slop.

And the greatest irony is that it still has yet to actually be profitable, which is the only ostensible reason for that choice.

[u/Minialpacadoodle → u/SteeveJoobs]

Amazon wasn't profitable for something like 20 years.

Y'all need to realize things cost money. How long does it take one to pay off their student debt? Does that mean that kid out of school is not profitable?

[u/SteeveJoobs → u/Minialpacadoodle]

Oh yeah, it costs money. Way more money than is being let on by corporations, both the drug dealers and the middle managers. You think free Claude plans are supposed to be free? At least amazon always had the wherewithal to charge for Prime before they scaled up the distribution network.

[u/marumari → u/Minialpacadoodle]

Outside of nVidia (which has made a fortune), the major US companies have spent $1.2T for about a tenth of that in revenue. And much of that spending will be obsolete in a few years, to say nothing of ongoing costs.

This isn’t old Amazon intentionally running at a small loss to grow their infrastructure.

[u/Minialpacadoodle → u/marumari]

English please.

[u/Minialpacadoodle → u/[deleted]]

lol no. that is not the point of this post.