Adding a Circa-2000 Amazon.com Every Day, Data Centers With No Air Conditioning

Earlier this week, I dropped by an Amazon Research Open House at the company’s new campus in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, as Hamilton told a roomful of people about the ways the AWS team is trying to wring efficiency out of data centers, where the rest of the industry is getting it wrong, and how big the company’s infrastructure growth looks. Here’s a link to the short deck of slides from his presentation.

That mind-boggling scale gets to Hamilton’s overall point, which was that the past five years have seen more data center technology than in the previous 15 years. A major reason, clearly, is that you now have enormous businesses like Amazon Web Services whose entire focus is finding infrastructure improvements—much different than when the work was an add-on at some other company specializing in a completely different business. Those people would never hire server designers or people specializing in power distribution. Nevertheless for something like AWS, “the only thing that matters is the efficiency in the infrastructure.”

“The difference between AWS being a very, very boring business, possibly even a money-loser, and a phenomenally successful business in other words able to reinvest back into the business, reinvest back into growth, reduce prices 11 times in four years—what makes that possible is the cost of the infrastructure,” Hamilton said. “That’s actually the dominant cost. Innovation and development—it matters, however it’s the infrastructure cost that’s more relevant. When you make that problem job one, what happens is, you start to see some technology.”

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