Name: No Nvidia Chips Needed! Amazon’s New AI Data Center For Anthropic Is Truly Massive
Uploaded: 2025-11-02T13:30:17.000Z
Duration: 16 min 56 s
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It's kind of surreal how fast this happened.

Adverbs of manner

It was all just dirt fields and nothing really there from the time we put the shovels into the ground when we actually have large customers building that has been in record breaking in speed and scale.

Behind me is the start of what will be the largest cluster of non Nvidia chips in the world.

And Amazon's newest data center, Megaproject, now fully operational here in New Carlisle, Indiana.

These seven completed buildings replaced empty cornfields fast about a year and are filled with hundreds of thousands of Amazon's own custom Trainium 2 chips.

And soon Trainium 3 across the US entirely devoted to running AI workloads for a single customer, OpenAI rival Anthropic.

So they're already running about 500,000 chips in Indiana today.

And in fact it's going so well that they've actually doubled down on that order and we expect jointly we'll be running more than a million trainium 2 chips by the end of this year.

We got the first on camera tour inside what Amazon's dubbing Project Rainier.

And it's coming online amid hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure build out announcements compute demand is at an all time high, but

some are concerned about a possible overbuild.

I think they're still building on a proposition that we may not end up seeing be realized.

It's just crazy how much building is going on.

These deals all sound great on paper, but

they only materialize when they're actually racked and loaded and usable by the customer.

Here in Indiana, this is just the first phase.

With two more campuses under construction now for a total of 30 buildings on this 1200 acres.

It'll consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power more than a million homes and millions of gallons of water, which has some local leaders and residents worried.

It's just difficult to keep losing farmland.

I was for some of the growth and my friends tried to tell me, you can't let them come in because once they get their toe in there they'll want more.

As Amazon plans out more facilities for Project Rainier in Mississippi and beyond, we sit down with top leaders to ask how this Indiana site came together so quickly, where all that power will come from and how Anthropic will train its AI here entirely without Nvidia.

Just over a year ago, all of this was farmland.

Now it's an operating AI data center, one of the world's largest.

AWS CEO Matt Garman spoke with CNBC's MacKenzie Cigalos about the project.

This is not some future project that we've talked about that maybe comes alive.

This is running and training their models today.

Cornfields, the data centers almost overnight.

In late 2022, around the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Amazon was shopping for a site for some big AI plans.

Talking to utility companies like American Electric Power.

Ashley Savio helped steer the deal through local subsidiary Indiana Michigan Power.

We introduced the concept of an Indiana data center to Amazon and they basically said, what do you have?

So we pointed Amazon to that location and the volume of extra high voltage transmission lines that exist, as well as a very substantial substation.

By the spring of 2023, Amazon was making site visits.

A year later, the $11 billion deal was official, the largest capital investment in Indiana history.

Amazon broke ground in September 2024 and seven buildings began full operation in October 2025.

The county granted Amazon more than $4 billion in property and technology tax exemptions over 35 years.

State legislation passed in 2019 will save Amazon some $4 billion more over 50 years.

In exchange, the state is going to have a GDP improvement of over a billion dollars.

And we brought in close to 9,000 jobs already.

While those are temporary construction related jobs, Amazon said it will create 1000 long with at least 600 of them paid above the county's average wage.

It was all just dirt fields and nothing really there.

Site leader Josh Salabedra's been building data centers with Amazon for 14 years.

He moved to Indiana from the West coast in 2024 to oversee the build, hiring four general contractors to make it happen.

Never seen us do a project this quickly and that's been the most exciting part of it.

We also have a second campus that we were working on as well.

I think that that's the customer demand right now, right?

And as we saw hey coming and machine learning coming, we changed it to a different building type.

Big tech companies have been trying all sorts of structures to help them build as fast as possible, like tents.

Meta's put up as it builds a data center in Ohio.

In Indiana, AWS has changed to another building type, adding efficiency and newer tech like liquid cooling for the next buildings under construction.

Now it's not just fast, but it is secure and reliable AWS infrastructure.

And so it's not a tent out there in a field.

It is a industrial Enterprise scale data centers.

Building out the total 30 buildings here, Amazon says will take at least two more years.

When complete, it's expected to consume about 2.2 gigawatts of electricity and millions of gallons of water, which is why local resident Dan Caruso had 100 of these signs made.

They're uncertain whether the power grid is going to be able to supply Amazon, GM and the town.

General Motors and Samsung are also building in New Carlisle, a $3.5 billion battery plant begun in 2024.

At Amazon, some 4,000 construction related workers come to the site daily to make the speedy build out possible.

That's a lot for the roads around this 1900 person town.

It's gotten very dangerous on Highway 20 and Highway 2 and the county has responded to that with more patrols.

Our police department for our town has been taxed because they do respond.

Also, that's the biggest concern is safety.

Amazon is paying $7 million for highway improvements and county officials told CNBC it's negotiating up to $15 million more for road improvements near the site.

Amazon is also paying $114 million for upgrades to other utilities like a water treatment plant and sewer lines.

Although an AI data center is different, AWS has been building data centers for its millions of cloud computing customers for nearly two decades and infrastructure services VP Prasad Kalyanaraman has been at Amazon that whole time.

When you want to build some capabilities for genai which are unique to genai, like the network or for instance liquid cooling and so on, those are additions on top of foundational capabilities that we built over a long period of time.

And that's why we're able to build at the scale that we are able to speed and scale are key.

As Amazon joins the crowded race to build Data Centers for AI Computer Meta's 2 GW Hyperion Data center in Louisiana and OpenAI's 1 GW Stargate site in Texas are two of the biggest that are being built Now.

Many providers of that talk about gigawatts of capacity, but

they don't tell you when they're going to get to gigawatt scale.

What we have with Rainier is a real thing, which you've seen physically as well.

But what else sets Amazon's apart is it's filled entirely with its own in house custom AI chips.

Behind me right now they are working on delivering these towers, two of them together is going to make up one ultra server and inside of that is 64 AI chips.

These are Amazon's own custom Trainium 2 chips and what's especially interesting is there are no Nvidia GPUs in there.

Amazon's been designing its own chips since 2013, starting with a specialized chip called Nitro.

It bought Israeli chip startup annapurna labs in 2015, where we got a tour, and

by 2018 had its own ARM based server chip Graviton.

Its first AI chip, Inferentia, came in 2019.

Amazon launched Trainium One in 2021 and Trainium Two came out last December.

AWS chips have one main keeping down costs.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in July that Trainium 2 offers 30 to 40% better price performance than rival GPU instances.

Availability also like there's massive backups for Nvidia chips and if you can get chips faster and not have to wait online for Jensen to give you what you need, then you could get working faster and be in much better shape.

Trainium chips are less powerful and Simpler than Nvidia GPUs, but

Amazon says by fitting twice as many in each building, it can boost compute power and keep electricity and cooling needs down.

When you are able to control the stack all the way from the lowest layer of the infrastructure, you're able to build the right set of capabilities that these model providers want.

You don't need to add all the other capabilities that you don't need.

Some say that training 1 and inferentia 2 instances haven't been as competitive for Genai training due to weak hardware specs or poor software integration.

What do you say to those specific critiques?

Sure, I fully admit Trainium 1 it was our first generation chip and that absolutely was a learning chip, both from an architecture perspective as well as a Software perspective.