Megan McCarty Carino

As we've talked about, spending on AI has gotten so big that it's outpacing consumer spending as a driver of GDP.

And today, we're going to look at one tiny innovation, one of thousands being made in the effort to build out that infrastructure.

It's literally humming in this lab.

What's going on in here?

All right, let's go.

There were wires everywhere.

Workers in jeans and T-shirts hovered over screens filled with code.

Satish pulled out a rack of little yellow plugs.

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

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.

Those little innovations, like a cable that's easier to plug in, might seem small, but that's the infrastructure required to make almost $2 trillion of AI investment pay off.

We'll be right back.

This is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

Inside, a research and development lab of Amazon Web Services that is working on new technology for the AI infrastructure build-out.

Satish Vangala, Director of Network Product Development, 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.