Megan McCarty Carino

This is APM.

A one-week special series on AI infrastructure.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

A couple weeks ago, I walked through an office building in Cupertino, California, into an industrial-looking room with exposed pipes and a concrete floor.

Satish Vangala is the director of network product development at Amazon Web Services.

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

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.