Dear Commons Community,

Amazon officially opened its $11 billion Rainier data center in Indiana on Wednesday, a large-scale facility dedicated to training and operating models from Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company backed by Amazon.

The 1,200-acre site houses roughly 500,000 of Amazon’s Trainium2 chips, with plans to double capacity as demand grows. AWS engineer Ron Diamant described the facility as one of Amazon Web Services’ most ambitious infrastructure projects to date, designed to power the next generation of generative AI systems.

Amazon shares rose 1.5% in premarket trading following the announcement. The company has made multiple investments in Anthropic, which was valued at about $183 billion in its latest funding round in September.

The new data center will not only support Anthropic’s existing AI models but also train future iterations of its Claude chatbot series. The project reinforces Amazon’s position in the expanding AI infrastructure race, where hyperscalers are competing to secure partnerships with leading model developers.

In addition to running Anthropic’s current models, the data center will also be used for updated versions of Anthropic’s generative AI chatbot, Claude, Amazon explained.

The unveiling comes after Anthropic announced earlier this month that it had expanded its partnership with Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), which will see it use Google’s tensor processing units. Anthropic said the expansion of the deal was worth “tens of billions of dollars” and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of capacity online in 2026.

Anthropic added at the time that it remains “committed” to working with its primary training partner and cloud provider, Amazon.

Amazon, Anthropic and Google are big players in the world of AI.  What they do, others will follow!

Tony