AWS to build 1.3GW of government-grade compute for Uncle Sam • The Register
Amazon Web Services on Monday announced a plan to build 1.3 gigawatts of compute capacity in new datacenters dedicated to serving the US government, at a cost of up to $50 billion.
The cloud colossus says it will break ground on the facilities in 2026, and that its new bit barns will add “AI and supercomputing capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.”
AWS CEO Matt Garman said the investment “removes the technology barriers that have held government back and further positions America to lead in the AI era.”
That’s a nice line, but Washington’s tech challenges are more complex than lack of access to IaaS.
As The Register has reported, the Pentagon’s IT estate has been a mess for years and reforms aren’t making much of a dent in its problems. The entire federal government has tried – and mostly failed – to standardize its categorization of IT costs and resources since 2017.
The Trump administration’s initial effort to address Washingtonian waste, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, is alleged to have leaked data and ignored cybersecurity standards.
AWS does have a point about availability of computing resources being a problem for the Feds, as NASA last year acknowledged that its supercomputer fleet is “oversubscribed and overburdened.” Access to AWS resources, however, may not be the answer to NASA’s woes given the agency once botched a cloud storage system by failing to understand how Amazon charges for data downloads.
Another thing to consider about AWS’s announcement is whether it represents additional capital expenditure on top of the already foreshadowed $125-billion-plus that Amazon plans to spend on cloudy infrastructure in FY 2026. It’s possible this announcement is just AWS adding some detail to its spending plan. Speaking of detail, there’s none about the timeline for completing these federal server farms.
Amazon’s announcement came hours after one of its rivals – Google Cloud – scored a deal to provide NATO with a sovereign air-gapped cloud. Jealous, much? ®
