An Amazon Web Services data center in Stone Ridge, Virginia, US, on Sunday, July 28, 2024.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OKLAHOMA CITY — Amazon and Nvidia executives said Thursday that the construction of artificial intelligence data centers is not slowing down, as recession fears have some investors questioning whether tech companies will pull back on some their plans.
“There’s been really no significant change,” Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, said at a conference organized by the Hamm Institute for American Energy. “We continue to see very strong demand, and we’re looking both in the next couple years as well as long term and seeing the numbers only going up.”
The comments run contrary to worrying buzz building on Wall Street about tech companies changing data center buildout plans. Wells Fargo analysts said Monday that Amazon Web Services is pausing some leases on data center commitments, citing industry sources. The magnitude of the pause was unclear, the analysts said, but the comments raised fears that Amazon was doing something similar to Microsoft’s recent move to pull back on some early stage projects.
Miller said “there’s been little tea leaf reading and extrapolating to strange results” about Amazon’s plans.
Nvidia is also not seeing signs of a slowdown, said Josh Parker, the chipmaker’s senior director of corporate sustainability.
“We haven’t seen a pullback,” Parker said. The advent China’s artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek sparked a selloff in power stocks earlier this year as investors worried that its AI model is more efficient and data centers might need as much energy as originally anticipated.
But Parker said Nvidia sees compute and energy demand only rising due to AI, describing the reaction to DeepSeek as “kneejerk.” Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said 50 gigawatts of new power capacity will be needed by 2027 to support AI. That’s the equivalent of about 50 new nuclear plants.
“Anthropic and the other AI companies, what we’re seeing is tremendous growth in the need for new baseload power. We’re seeing unprecedented growth,” Clark said.
The executives were speaking at a gathering of tech and energy companies at a conference in Oklahoma City organized by the Hamm Institute to discuss how the U.S. can address the growing energy needs for artificial intelligence. There’s a growing consensus in both industries that natural gas will be needed to meet the power needs.