Allie Trella-Jones

I'm Kristen Schwab, a millennial, and according to Consumer Confidence Data, a slightly less grumpy-than-average American for Marketplace.

Coming up.

Everyone's heard that an awful lot.

It's like the boy that cried wolf.

Sometimes the thing you remember most from a place is the sound.

It's literally humming in this lab.

What's going on in here?

All right, let's go.

I'm talking with Satish Vangala.

He's the director of network product development at Amazon Web Services.

AWS is the biggest cloud computing provider, so the company's been scaling up network infrastructure for decades.

And just like interstates and highways, if you don't have the right infrastructure, you can end up with pretty bad bottlenecks, right?

As in no delays for you when you're trying to make an AI generated holiday card or getting chat GPT to analyze your spending habits.

The problem is artificial intelligence increases traffic on that information highway.

Amazon Web Services and other cloud computing companies like Microsoft and Google are in an arms race to become the home of the AI economy.

Just a couple months ago, Amazon announced a $15 billion bond sale, its first in three years.

Today, the company announced another 16,000 corporate job cuts after 14,000 last year as it focuses on building out AI infrastructure.

That includes building more data centers, of course.

You could think of that as more roads, but also trying to improve the network technology itself.

Here inside this lab at AWS offices, a lot of what Satish and his team are working on is making data move faster.