Allie Trella-Jones

There were wires everywhere and workers in jeans and T-shirts hovering over screens filled with code.

In one room on a wall of computer servers, Satish pulled out a rack of little yellow plugs.

Kind of like the Ethernet cables you might stick into your home computer.

Yep, I've seen a lot of them recently as I've been reporting on data centers.

AWS has built about 9 million kilometers of fiber cable to link computers around the world.

It's enough to stretch to the moon and back 11 times.

And it's all connected with fiddly little plugs like these.

So the ergonomics of actually plugging those individually.

The whole point of this is to build data centers.

Satish also showed me these devices, they're called transponders, that convert electric signals, aka data, into light waves.

They look a little bit like nail clippers.

I mean, when we were looking at, you know, just the little sockets and how you're engineering all of this stuff, it just really calls to mind how the infrastructure build-out, it's all these little pieces that have to come together to make it work, right?

What are the challenges on your side, on the networking side, to meeting that demand?

That reliability is already important in our internet-connected lives.

This past fall, an AWS outage caused all kinds of problems, from college students unable to access online textbooks to smart beds malfunctioning in the middle of the night.

And outages could be even more disruptive as AI gets integrated across different parts of the economy.

Tiny innovations like a cable that's easier to plug in or something that increases the virtual speed limit on the information highway might seem small, but that's the infrastructure required to make the billions that investors have poured into AI research pay off.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

As the end of 2025 came upon us, we kept hearing every week that we were getting a decision.

We were getting a decision.