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A radical of Amazon engineers person stood up against their ain leader astatine a Seattle City Council hearing, criticising tech giants for pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial quality (AI) infrastructure portion simultaneously slashing thousands of quality staff.
According to a study by Fortune, the workers pointed retired an ‘irony’: Big Tech companies are spending humanities amounts of superior to physique information centres, each to powerfulness the precise AI agents designed to regenerate the workers they are laying off.“It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 cardinal connected capital, with astir of it going to information centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a bundle technologist astatine Amazon Web Services (AWS), testified during a Seattle Land Use and Sustainability Committee proceeding this week.
Amazon worker besides attacks Microsoft
Schloesser was 1 of 3 Amazon employees who attended the section proceeding to request stricter regulations connected information centre developments. “Microsoft is spending $190 billion. Meanwhile, the leaders astatine my institution person laid disconnected 30,000 firm employees successful the past 8 months,” Schloesser told the committee, adding, “What that tells maine is that Big Tech is hopeless to physique arsenic overmuch compute capableness arsenic it can, arsenic accelerated arsenic it can.”
Following the nationalist outcry from tech workers and section residents implicit proposals to physique 5 large-scale information complexes astir the city, the Seattle City Council took action. The assembly voted successful favour of a yearlong prohibition connected section information centre construction. This impermanent halt volition springiness the metropolis much clip to draught due biology and zoning regulations for AI infrastructure growth.
What Amazon has to accidental to worker outcry
In effect to the hearing, Amazon stated that it presently has nary plans to conception information centres wrong the existent metropolis limits of Seattle, and remains committed to section economical improvement arsenic good arsenic is moving to amended h2o and vigor ratio crossed its infrastructure projects.“We respect our colleagues’ close to dependable their opinions,” Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told Fortune. She added, “We prosecute regularly with assemblage stakeholders to recognize section priorities and code concerns transparently, supporting some technological innovation and the circumstantial needs of each portion wherever we operate.”
