- Amazon engineers railed at their employer for conducting mass layoffs while committing to spend $200 billion this year on AI infrastructure, including data centers.
- The engineers spoke at a Seattle City Council meeting, where officials unanimously passed a proposal to limit new mega data center developments for one year.
- Amazon has laid off more than 30,000 corporate employees since October.
“It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion dollars on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, said at a hearing. “Microsoft is spending $190 billion. Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months. What that tells me is that Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can, as fast as it can.”
An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that the company respects its colleagues’ right to voice their opinions.
Officials in Seattle voted to approve a one-year moratorium on new large-scale artificial intelligence data centers to allow time for the city to regulate the projects. The proposal came after four developers approached a local utility provider to pitch building five large scale facilities in Seattle. Two of those developers have since withdrawn their proposals following public outcry, the Seattle Times reported…