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At Amazon's Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I.

On 1,200 acres of cornfield in Indiana, Amazon is building one of the
largest computers ever for work with Anthropic, an artificial
intelligence start-up.

Amazon's vast data center campus will consume 2.2 gigawatts of
electricity -- enough to power a million homes.

At Amazon's Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I.

On 1,200 acres of cornfield in Indiana, Amazon is building one of the
largest computers ever for work with Anthropic, an artificial
intelligence start-up.

Amazon's vast data center campus will consume 2.2 gigawatts of
electricity -- enough to power a million homes.Credit...

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Karen WeiseCade MetzA.J. Mast

By Karen Weise and Cade Metz

Visuals by A.J. Mast

Karen Weise covers Amazon. Cade Metz covers artificial intelligence.

  * June 24, 2025

A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle,
Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up
from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium.

Over the next several years, Amazon plans to build around 30 data
centers at the site, packed with hundreds of thousands of specialized
computer chips. With hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber
connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will
form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence.

The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity -- enough to
power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of
water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a
single customer in mind: the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which aims to
create an A.I. system that matches the human brain.

The complex -- so large that it can be viewed completely only from
high in the sky -- is the first in a new generation of data centers
being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project
Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters.
Project Rainier will also include facilities in Mississippi and
possibly other locations, like North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Project Rainier is Amazon's entry into a race by the technology
industry to build data centers so large they would have been
considered absurd just a few years ago. Meta, which owns Facebook,
Instagram and WhatsApp, is building a two-gigawatt data center in
Louisiana. OpenAI is erecting a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Texas and
another, nearly as large, in the United Arab Emirates.

These data centers will dwarf most of today's, which were built
before OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot inspired the A.I. boom in 2022. The
tech industry's increasingly powerful A.I. technologies require
massive networks of specialized computer chips -- and hundreds of
billions of dollars to build the data centers that house those chips.
The result: behemoths that stretch the limits of the electrical grid
and change the way the world thinks about computers.

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