In Pennsylvania, Amazon plans to invest $20 billion in two data center complexes, one of which it is constructing next to a nuclear power station that has come under federal inspection for a design that would essentially connect straight into the power plant.
It plans to acquire its power from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in northeastern Pennsylvania, where one data center is now under construction.
The other will be located on the site of a former US Steel plant in Fairless Hills at the Keystone Trade Centre, a logistics complex. According to Amazon, the data center will be powered by the electrical grid.
While detractors claim that data centers only employ a small number of people and have no long-term impact on job creation, supporters point out that building them requires a significant number of construction jobs, costs local vendors a lot of money, and generates significant tax income for local governments.
Tens of millions of dollars in incentives, which are usually a crucial component of data center agreements as governments vie for the massive deployments they believe will be a financial boon, will be offered by Pennsylvania.
Additionally, Amazon will be able to take use of Pennsylvania's current sales tax exemption on purchases of servers and routers, which is a must for most states to retain their competitiveness.
The announcements supplement the billions of money that the state is receiving from Big Tech's data centers.
In order to compete with other tech giants and meet the increasing demand for artificial intelligence goods, Amazon has committed to investing approximately $10 billion each in data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina from the beginning of 2024.
In the meantime, the demand for energy-hungry data centers—which require power to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and cooling systems—has increased due to the quick development of cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
In essence, Amazon is demolishing the data center and constructing a bigger one on the property.
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Connecting data centers directly to a power plant is a considerably quicker way for Big Tech to obtain power than connecting to the crowded electrical grid, and it can save years off their development timeframes.