No Nvidia Chips Needed! Amazon’s New AI Data Center For Anthropic Is Truly Massive

Our Take

Credit to CNBC for actually driving out to New Carlisle and putting cameras on the people who live next to this thing, not just the chip racks. A cornfield-to-2.2-gigawatt campus in about a year is the buildout story in miniature: permits move fast, transmission and rate cases move slow, and the folks who'll be paying for both usually find out after the concrete's poured. Half a million custom AWS chips dedicated to a single AI lab is also a reminder that this race isn't just an Nvidia story anymore — it's Amazon building its own captive supply chain, at a scale that used to describe entire regional grids.

The number that should stop you is 2.2 gigawatts, once all 30 buildings are online, sited in a rural Indiana county. That's a load comparable to a mid-size city, and it doesn't come from nowhere — it comes from ratepayers, new gas or transmission builds, and utility commission dockets most residents never get to weigh in on until the bill arrives. CNBC's interviews with locals worried about their electric rates are the real story here: the AWS CEO talking up jobs and tax base is one side of the ledger, but nobody on camera is explaining who eats the cost if power prices climb for everyone else in the service territory.

This is exactly the kind of deal we track: check our facility map to see how New Carlisle compares to other mega-campuses going up in your state, and if you want to know how to actually show up at a utility hearing or county meeting before the shovels break ground, our take-action page has the playbook.