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

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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

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.

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Jon Keegan2h

Anthropic says that a group of Chinese AI startups are “distilling” their models by setting up huge numbers of fake accounts for Claude AI. In a blog post, Anthropic said that it disrupted “industrial-scale” campaigns by Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. The company said that the group had over 16 million exchanges with Claude, after setting up 24,000 “fraudulent” accounts. Anthropic said it is developing countermeasures to prevent such attacks in the future.

Jon Keegan5h

Report: OpenAI’s Stargate has been a chaotic mess

Just over a year ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stood alongside President Trump, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to announce an ambitious $500 billion plan to build massive data centers in the US — Project Stargate.

While today an actual Stargate 1-gigawatt data center is certainly well under construction in Abilene, Texas, it turns out there wasn’t much of a plan in place at the time of the announcement, according to a new report from The Information.

The past year has been full of partner disputes, debt problems, and scuttled plans as the loosely defined project races to build the AI computing infrastructure that OpenAI is craving as competition heats up.

Per the report, OpenAI tried to build its own data centers as the project stalled, but lenders balked at funding the risky project. They eventually settled on the current plan, in which partner Oracle borrows the money and leases capacity back to OpenAI. OpenAI was still able to control the design of the facility.

The slow start for the project resulted in OpenAI missing its own goal of 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity from Oracle and SoftBank by the end of 2025.

Inside OpenAI’s Scramble to Get Computing Power After Stargate Stalled

The slow start for the project resulted in OpenAI missing its own goal of 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity from Oracle and SoftBank by the end of 2025.

Rani Molla7h

Ives says AI represents huge opportunity for cybersecurity firms as losses mount

Cybersecurity stocks continued to slide Monday, after Anthropic unveiled a new security feature for its AI model Friday. The company’s AI advancements have been wreaking havoc across software firms, and its latest foray appears to be doing the same to cybersecurity leaders, including CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Cloudflare.

But similar to Dan Ives’ broader thesis on the software sell-off — which he has called “overblown,” arguing that the companies getting hit may ultimately become “core participants in the AI Revolution” — the Wedbush Securities analyst says AI is actually a positive for cybersecurity stocks.

“Anthropic going after this market with an initial tool validates our thesis that cyber security is the next frontier for the AI Revolution,” Ives wrote Monday morning, arguing that AI is elevating the risk environment — and the need for cybersecurity firms in the first place.

“AI will be a major tailwind to the cyber security sector over the coming years as protection of use cases, data, and endpoints expand markedly,” he said, adding that companies including CrowdStrike and Zscaler are well positioned to capitalize on the shift by incorporating AI into their strategies.

Rani Molla8h

Analysts slash Salesforce price targets ahead of Wednesday earnings, as narrative of AI eating its lunch persists

A number of analysts have significantly lowered their price targets for Salesforce, citing growing fears that AI workforce tools, including Anthropic’s Cowork, could threaten parts of its core business. According to reports, here are some of the recent cuts:

Morgan Stanley cut its price target nearly 30%, to $287 from $398.
Jefferies slashed its forecast 33%, to $250 from $375.
Barclays reduced its price target to $265 from $338.
Evercore ISI went to $260 from $340.
Last week, Citigroup also reduced its price target to $197 from $257.

Earlier this month, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives offered a different view, adding Salesforce to his list of top 30 AI companies and calling the stock a “core participant” in the “AI revolution.” He described the recent software sell-off as “overblown.”

Shares of Salesforce, which reports earnings Wednesday, are down 30% year to date and 1% premarket today.

Max Knoblauch2/20/26

Report: Amazon’s AI bots have been behind multiple AWS outages

Amazon’s AI tool Kiro, which launched in July and can code autonomously, was behind a 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services in December, according to reporting by the Financial Times.

The FT reports that the company’s AI tools have caused AWS service disruptions at least twice in recent months.

In the December outage, which Amazon called an “extremely limited event” that did not have an impact on customer-facing service, engineers allowed Kiro to make changes and the tool opted to “delete and recreate the environment.”

Amazon has a closely tracked internal target that 80% of its developers use AI to code once a week, employees told the FT. The company says the December incident was a “user access control issue” and not an issue with Kiro’s permissions.

AWS accounted for 57% of Amazon’s operating profit in 2025. In December, following a larger outage months earlier, AWS and Google announced a partnership to attempt to prevent massive network outages.

Update, February 20, 5:50 p.m. ET: In a statement to Sherwood News, an AWS spokesperson disputed the report, writing:

“These brief events were the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI. The December service interruption was an extremely limited event when a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our two Regions in Mainland China was affected. This event didn’t impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. We are not aware of any related customer inquiries resulting from this isolated interruption. Following these events, we implemented numerous additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access, enhanced training on AI-assisted troubleshooting, and resource protection measures. Kiro puts developers in control — users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action.”

Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot

Update, February 20, 5:50 p.m. ET: In a statement to Sherwood News, an AWS spokesperson disputed the report, writing:

“These brief events were the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI. The December service interruption was an extremely limited event when a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our two Regions in Mainland China was affected. This event didn’t impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. We are not aware of any related customer inquiries resulting from this isolated interruption. Following these events, we implemented numerous additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access, enhanced training on AI-assisted troubleshooting, and resource protection measures. Kiro puts developers in control — users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action.”

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