A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI data center in New Carlisle, Indiana, on October 2, 2025 (Noah Berger/Getty Images)

AI AI AI

What Amazon’s latest data center announcement says about AI right now

The first Amazon data centers in Louisiana will cost $12 billion and require a lot of preemptive defense.

Rani Molla

2/23/26 3:33PM

Another day, another Big Tech data center.

Today Amazon announced plans to spend $12 billion on its first data center campuses in Louisiana.

“Amazon’s $12 billion investment in northwest Louisiana will build next-generation data center campuses to support AI and cloud computing, ensuring opportunities for local communities,” Amazon Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer David Zapolsky said in the press release. “We’re creating hundreds of high-paying jobs and making substantial investments in local infrastructure.”

Like Meta — which unveiled a $10 billion data center in Indiana earlier this month and is already building a mammoth data center in Louisiana — Amazon’s announcement reads like the standard 2026 AI company template for data centers.

It’s bringing jobs! Amazon says the project will require 1,500 construction workers and 540 full-time employees to operate the facilities. As we’ve noted, for projects that cost this much, the long-term employment footprint is relatively small.

It’s paying for its own electricity! Tech companies have recently been put on notice by the White House over concerns they could pass grid upgrade costs on to local ratepayers, so releases now emphasize privately funded energy infrastructure.

It’s doing a lot for the community! Cue the STEM grants and infrastructure funds.

Why have these announcements become so rote? Because, as The New York Times recently wrote, AI has an image problem. Households are increasingly wary of its environmental and social impact, while investors are scrutinizing the enormous capital outlays required to build it.

We know from recent Big Tech earnings calls that AI demand isn’t slowing. But if the spending sounds confident, the messaging sounds defensive — a sign that the politics and economics of AI are getting more complicated.

Jon Keegan15h

OpenAI: Our new AI tool is too dangerous to release, too!

This week, Anthropic warned that it had developed a new model that was too dangerous to cybersecurity to be released to the public.

According to a new report, OpenAI is saying similar things about a new cybersecurity tool it is working on (separate from its rumored forthcoming Spud model).

Axios wrote that OpenAI is allowing a small group of partners to test its new AI tool, which has “advanced cybersecurity capabilities.”

The realization that we have arrived at an era of powerful new AI models that could overwhelm current cybersecurity defenses is spooking investors, with cybersecurity stocks like Cloudflare, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto Networks all down sharply this morning.

Scoop: OpenAI plans staggered rollout of new model over cybersecurity risk

Axios wrote that OpenAI is allowing a small group of partners to test its new AI tool, which has “advanced cybersecurity capabilities.”

Jon Keegan15h

OpenAI’s Stargate shrinks further as UK data center “paused”

OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate global data center project just got smaller.

First announced at the White House alongside President Trump at the start of his second term, the OpenAI partnership with Oracle and SoftBank sought to build massive data centers around the world, including sites in the UAE, the UK, and Norway.

Bloomberg reports that the company is “pausing” the Stargate UK project, citing high energy costs and regulatory obstacles.

Last month, the company and its partner Oracle scrapped its planned expansion of the Stargate I data center site in Abilene, Texas.

In a statement to Bloomberg, the company said:

“AI compute is foundational to that goal — we continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Stargate UK was announced in September, including a partnership with Nvidia and Nscale that would scale up to 31,000 GPUs.

OpenAI Pauses Stargate UK Data Center Effort Citing Energy Costs

Bloomberg reports that the company is “pausing” the Stargate UK project, citing high energy costs and regulatory obstacles.

Last month, the company and its partner Oracle scrapped its planned expansion of the Stargate I data center site in Abilene, Texas.

In a statement to Bloomberg, the company said:

“AI compute is foundational to that goal — we continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Stargate UK was announced in September, including a partnership with Nvidia and Nscale that would scale up to 31,000 GPUs.

Jon Keegan4/8/26

Meta jumps after it releases Superintelligence Labs’ first model: Muse Spark

The first big release from Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is here — a new multimodal reasoning model called Muse Spark. Shares of Meta spiked on the news, extending gains it had made earlier in the day on optimism over the ceasefire with Iran. The stock was recently up about 9%.

Meta has been playing catch-up in the generative-AI race, watching startups OpenAI and Anthropic leap ahead with ever more capable models, after the bungled rollout of its Llama 4 models.

After Meta went on an expensive hiring spree assembling an all-star team of AI researchers, investors have been eager to see the fruits of this team, and to see if the accompanying billions of capex dedicated to power it — $115 billion to $135 billion this year alone — were worth it.

Meta says the release is the first in a Muse family of models, which it says it will scale up over time. The benchmark scores released by Meta show Spark to be capable, with solid scores among popular benchmarks, but not any huge leaps over leading models from Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Google.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads:

“Looking ahead, we plan to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models. We are building products that don’t just answer your questions but act as agents that do things for you. I am optimistic that this will support a wave of creativity, entrepreneurship, growth, and health. I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.”

Introducing Muse Spark: Scaling Towards Personal Superintelligence

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads:

“Looking ahead, we plan to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models. We are building products that don’t just answer your questions but act as agents that do things for you. I am optimistic that this will support a wave of creativity, entrepreneurship, growth, and health. I’m looking forward to sharing more soon.”

Jon Keegan4/8/26

Alibaba launches new data center powered by 10,000 of its custom chips

Alibaba announced a new data center in southern China, in a partnership with China Telecom powered by its own Zhenwu chips. The new data center will contain 10,000 of the homegrown chips, and may scale up to 100,000 over time. The data center will be used for both inference and training.

China is racing to build out its own sovereign AI capabilities, and is making significant progress.

While Chinese companies and labs have released many competitive AI models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s new GLM-5.1, and the disruptive DeepSeek R1, China is still behind the US when it comes to AI chips, and it has struggled to get hold of the latest Nvidia GPUs due to US export controls.

Alibaba launches data center with 10,000 of its own chips as China ramps up AI push

China is racing to build out its own sovereign AI capabilities, and is making significant progress.

Hyunsoo Rim

Anthropic

4/8/26

Anthropic’s revenue run rate just topped $30 billion — that’s ahead of OpenAI, depending on how you count

The Claude maker’s revenue run rate has tripled in three months, as Dario Amodei’s firm takes the software world by storm.