AWS to build 1.3 gigawatts of government-grade supercomputing power for Uncle Sam

Amazon Web Services on Monday announced a plan to build 1.3 gigawatts of compute capacity in new datacenters dedicated to serving the US government, at a cost of up to $50 billion.

The cloud colossus says it will break ground on the facilities in 2026, and that its new bit barns will add “AI and supercomputing capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.”

AWS CEO Matt Garman said the investment “removes the technology barriers that have held government back and further positions America to lead in the AI era.”

That’s a nice line, but Washington’s tech challenges are more complex than lack of access to IaaS.

As The Register has reported, the Pentagon’s IT estate has been a mess for years and reforms aren’t making much of a dent in its problems. The entire federal government has tried – and mostly ...