A year ago, it was farmland. Now, the 1,200-acre site near Lake Michigan is home to one of the largest operational AI data centers in the world. It’s called Project Rainier, and it’s the spot where Amazon is training frontier artificial intelligence models entirely on its own chips.
Amazon and its competitors have pledged more than $1 trillion towards AI data center projects that are so ambitious, skeptics wonder if there’s enough money, energy and community support to get them off the ground.
OpenAI has Stargate — its name for a slate of mammoth AI data centers that it plans to develop. Rainier is Amazon’s $11 billion answer. And it’s not a concept, but a cluster that’s already online.
The complex was built exclusively to train and run models from Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, and one of Amazon’s largest cloud customers and AI partners.
“This is not some future project that we’ve talked about that maybe comes alive,” Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, told CNBC in an interview at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. “This is running and training their models today.”
Tech’s megacaps are all racing to build supercomputing sites to meet an expected explosion in demand. Meta is planning a 2-gigawatt Hyperion site in Louisiana, while Google parent Alphabet just broke ground in West Memphis, Arkansas, across the Mississippi River from Elon Musk’s Colossus data center for his startup xAI.
In the span of a month, OpenAI committed to 33 gigawatts of new compute, a buildout CEO Sam Altman says represents $1.4 trillion in upcoming obligations, with partners including Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom and Oracle.
Amazon is already delivering, thanks to decades of experience in large-scale logistics. From massive fulfillment centers and logistics hubs to AWS data centers and its HQ2 project, Amazon has deep and close relationships with state and local officials and a playbook that’s now being used to get AI infrastructure set up in record time.
“These deals all sound great on paper,” said Mike Krieger, chief product officer at Anthropic, which has raised billions of dollars from Amazon. “But they only materialize when they’re actually racked and loaded and usable by the customer. And Amazon is incredible at that.”
The public unveiling of Rainier comes a day ahead of Amazon’s third-quarter earnings report. Investors will be listening closely for commentary on capital expenditures, but they also want to know how quickly capex projects will convert into revenue, and eventually, profit.
On Tuesday, Amazon announced 14,000 layoffs as part of a broader push to flatten management and reallocate resources to priority areas like AI and the company’s Trainium chips.
The genesis of the Rainier complex dates back to the spring of 2023.
Roughly six months after ChatGPT launched, Amazon started scouting land in rural Indiana, working with American Electric Power through its Indiana Michigan Power subsidiary. A year later, it signed an $11 billion agreement with Indiana, the largest capital investment in the state’s history.
Construction began in September of last year and, as of this month, seven buildings are already online, with two more campuses underway. The full site will eventually span 30 buildings and draw more than 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 1.6 million homes.
