A group of Amazon engineers spoke out against unfettered data center construction, calling out their own employer for pouring money into AI infrastructure while slashing headcount. The employees pointed out the hypocrisy between the company spending billions to build these infrastructure projects, all the while laying off thousands in anticipation of the AI agents these data centers would power to replace them.
“It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, said at a Seattle Land Use and Sustainability Committee hearing on Wednesday. He was one of three Amazon employees who made comments supporting increased regulation of local data center development.
“Microsoft is spending $190 billion. Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months,” Schloesser added. “What that tells me is that Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can, as fast as it can.”
Seattle City Council ultimately voted in favor of a yearlong moratorium of local data center construction following public outcry over proposals to build five large-scale complexes around the city. The moratorium will give the city more time to regulate AI infrastructure growth in the area.
