In a paper this month, the CMA said it had found an “interconnected web” of more than 90 partnerships and investments involving the same six Big Tech groups " /FT/
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aboutamazon.com: Amazon customers in the West Valley Phoenix Metro Area are now receiving Prime Air drone deliveries from our Tolleson, AZ, Same-Day Delivery site.
With this new location, we’re fully integrating into Amazon’s delivery network, meaning, for the first time, our new MK30 drones will deploy from facilities next to our Same-Day Delivery site in Tolleson. These smaller sites are hybrid—part fulfillment center, part delivery station. They allow us to fulfill, sort, and deliver products all from one site so we can get packages out to our customers even quicker.
Our Same-Day Delivery sites are situated close to the large metro areas they serve, which means customers get their orders faster. And with connections to the larger Amazon fulfillment centers nearby, we are able to offer Same-Day Delivery on millions of items.
Safety is our top priority. Our new drone, the MK30, has received FAA approval to begin operations to customers. Our approval includes the ability to fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight, using our sophisticated on-board detect and avoid system. This is an historic, first-of-its-kind approval for a new drone system and a new operating location following a rigorous FAA evaluation of the safety of our systems and processes.
Amazon Maintains Dominant Lead in the Cloud Market
@ftr_investors: $AMZN$MSFT$GOOGL Cloud provider market share after Q3 2024 earnings. Total revenue increased to $84B, with Amazon leading at 31% market share, followed by Azure at 20% and Google Cloud at 12%.
Amazon signs agreements for innovative nuclear energy projects to address growing energy demands
aboutamazon.com: [Excerpt] New Small Modular Reactor agreements are part of Amazon’s plan to transition to carbon-free energy.
In Washington, our agreement with Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities, will enable the development of four advanced SMRs. The reactors will be constructed, owned and operated by Energy Northwest, and are expected to generate roughly 320 megawatts (MW) of capacity for the first phase of the project, with the option to increase to 960 MW total—enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes. These projects will help meet the forecasted energy needs of the Pacific Northwest beginning in the early 2030s.
We’re also making an investment in X-energy, a leading developer of next-generation SMR reactors and fuel, and X-energy’s advanced nuclear reactor design will be used in the Energy Northwest project. The investment includes manufacturing capacity to develop the SMR equipment to support more than five gigawatts of new nuclear energy projects utilizing X-energy’s technology.
In Virginia, we’ve signed an agreement with utility company Dominion Energy to explore the development of an SMR project near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. This will bring at least 300 megawatts of power to the Virginia region, where Dominion projects that power demands will increase by 85% over the next 15 years.
Helping preserve existing nuclear reactors
We also previously signed an agreement to co-locate a data center facility next to the Talen Energy’s nuclear facility in Pennsylvania, which will directly power our data centers with carbon-free energy, and helps preserve this existing reactor.
@cnscccsn : How small are Small Modular Reactors? (2/23/21):
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☑️ #146 Oct 15, 2024
Databricks Strengthens Partnership with AWS to Deliver Advanced Generative AI Capabilities
databricks.com: [Excerpt] Databricks to use AWS Trainium AI chips to accelerate development of custom models built with Mosaic AI.
SAN FRANCISCO – October 15, 2024 – Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the development of custom models built with Databricks Mosaic AI on AWS. Databricks will leverage AWS Trainium chips as the preferred AI chip to power Mosaic AI model training and serving capabilities on AWS. Joint customers can leverage Mosaic AI to pretrain, fine-tune, augment and serve large language models (LLMs) on their private data, backed by the scale, performance and security of AWS. The expanded partnership will also include new integrations for Databricks on AWS Marketplace.
aws.amazon.com: [Excerpt] Learn how EC2 Trn1 instances give Databricks the scale, high performance, and cost-efficiency they need to train their Mosaic MPT models.
AWS Unveils Next Generation AWS-Designed Chips (11/28/23): [Excerpt] Trainium2 chips are purpose-built for high performance training of FMs and LLMs with up to trillions of parameters. Trainium2 is designed to deliver up to 4x faster training performance and 3x more memory capacity compared to first generation Trainium chips, while improving energy efficiency (performance/watt) up to 2x. Trainium2 will be available in Amazon EC2 Trn2 instances, containing 16 Trainium chips in a single instance. Trn2 instances are intended to enable customers to scale up to 100,000 Trainium2 chips in next generation EC2 UltraClusters, interconnected with AWS Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) petabit-scale networking, delivering up to 65 exaflops of compute and giving customers on-demand access to supercomputer-class performance. With this level of scale, customers can train a 300-billion parameter LLM in weeks versus months. By delivering the highest scale-out ML training performance at significantly lower costs, Trn2 instances can help customers unlock and accelerate the next wave of advances in generative AI. To learn more about Trainium, visit aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/trainium/.
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☑️ #145 Oct 7, 2024 🔴 rumor
Amazon could cut 14,000 managerial roles
@refsrc: Morgan Stanley estimates that Amazon will cut nearly 14,000 managerial roles by the end of Q1 2025.
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☑️ #144 Oct 7, 2024
FTCv. Amazon.com Inc
courtlistener.com: Citation: Federal Trade Commission v. Amazon.com Inc, 2:23-cv-01495, (W.D. Wash.)
Statements and Sealed Order:
@big_cases: New filing: "Federal Trade Commission v. Amazon.com Inc (E-Commerce Monopoly)"
[Excerpt] SEALED ORDER re Defendant's 127 MOTION to Dismiss & Plaintiffs' 167 MOTION to Bifurcate. The Court GRANTS in part and DENIES in part the 127 Motion to Dismiss as described herein. The Court GRANTS Plaintiffs until 10/31/2024, leave to file a Second Amended Complaint as to any claims dismissed without prejudice. Regarding Plaintiffs' 167 Motion to Bifurcate, the Court ORDERS that the bench trial identified in the Case Scheduling Order (Dkt. # 159 ) will address only Amazon's liability under the FTC Act, Sherman Act, and the state laws implicated by Plaintiffs' Amended Complaint. If the Court renders a decision finding Amazon liable, the Court will schedule a conference to address how to proceed on remedies. The Court provisionally files this order under seal. The Court DIRECTS the parties to file a joint statement, on or before 10/14/2024, indicating what redactions, if any, should be included in the public version of the order. Signed by Judge John H. Chun. (SB) Document unsealed on 10/4/2024 per the instruction of chambers (SB). (Entered: 09/30/2024)
🔹Related content:
ftc.gov (9/26/23): [Excerpt] FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power. Amazon’s ongoing pattern of illegal conduct blocks competition, allowing it to wield monopoly power to inflate prices, degrade quality, and stifle innovation for consumers and businesses.
Telltales Podcast: Part 3 of our Mag7 Cashflow Risk Series: $AMZN ; Plus + FTC files suit against PBMs & how Oracle is leveraging AI to win back database customers.
Principal Nuclear Engineer, Datacenter Engineering, Power Generation Solutions
amazon.jobs: [Excerpt] Job ID: 2741394 | Amazon Data Services, Inc.
The successful candidate will have experience in end-to-end nuclear power project development process from design, regulatory licensing, site permitting, constructability and operations.
The candidate should be highly skilled in the design and operation of both utility-scale and small modular nuclear power plants, understanding design and constructability of various reactor designs inclusive of both the nuclear steam supply system and balance of plant. Within Amazon, the candidate will collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team across energy, engineering, construction, environmental, legal, policy, public relations, Operations, and community engagement teams. The candidate must navigate the permitting and regulatory processes to help AWS deliver capacity-enabling projects. They must be able to drive key stakeholders across Amazon teams and also with utilities and energy companies to deliver such projects.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) – small-scale nuclear reactors that can in theory be placed at power plants or on-site at data center campuses – are regularly being pitched as a new energy option for data center operators. Compared to traditional reactors, they can in theory offer capacity quickly and be built relatively cheaply.
Data center firms Equinix and Wyoming Hyperscale [since renamed Prometheus Hyperscale] have signed deals for SMR capacity with Oklo, while crypto mining firm Standard Power has said it will procure 2GW of SMR capacity from NuScale.
The Cumulus data center Amazon acquired next to the Susquehanna nuclear power station. Source: Data Centre Dynamics Ltd.
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☑️ #140 Sep 19, 2024
Amazon launches a powerful new generative AI-based selling assistant codenamed Project Amelia
aboutamazon.com: [Excerpt] Launching today, this personal AI assistant was built using Amazon Bedrock and offers tailored business insights to boost productivity and drive seller growth.
Starting today, Project Amelia can provide valuable responses to sellers’ questions, as well as offer fast access to critical business metrics and reports that are unique to each seller. We will continue to enhance the core, broad knowledgebase for Project Amelia and continue to build on its expertise to ensure it covers the specific domains we know matter most to sellers. As Amelia evolves, it will provide a more personalized experience and will increasingly gain the ability to not only converse with sellers, but anticipate their needs, take actions, and resolve issues on their behalf.
Oracle and Amazon Web Services Announce Strategic Partnership
oracle.com: [Excerpt] Customers can now access Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service in AWS, simplifying the migration and deployment of enterprise workloads to the cloud while improving agility, flexibility, and security.
Oracle and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) today announced the launch of Oracle Database@AWS, a new offering that allows customers to access Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure and Oracle Exadata Database Service within AWS. Oracle Database@AWS will provide customers with a unified experience between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and AWS, offering simplified database administration, billing, and unified customer support. In addition, customers will have the ability to seamlessly connect enterprise data in their Oracle Database to applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Analytics services, or AWS’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services, including Amazon Bedrock.
Engineer at Apple: "Graviton's competitive pricing actually is helping us to do that
@techfund: Engineer at Apple says that 30% of their AWS cloud workloads are already over Amazon's Graviton CPU as opposed to Intel or AMD. He thinks start-ups will go 100% over Graviton as AWS is heavily promoting its own CPU, telling customers that Graviton is 35-40% more cost effective than Intel CPUs.
Going forward, he sees workloads over Graviton increasing. Historically they haven't done so as they like to be able to shift workloads over different clouds e.g. if AWS goes down, start up the workload in GCP.
But with Docker/ Kubernetes-based containers, this additional software layer can abstract away from the local hardware you're using. So if you're running apps in multi-architecture containers, you can easily shift apps between clouds while still making use of the local cloud optimized ASICs such as Graviton.
So basically with multi-architecture containers, you get the best of both worlds i.e. the software flexibility to switch clouds and the benefits of cheap localized ASICs.
Basically, our Graviton consumption would still go a little up higher. It'd still go somewhere around 50% to 60% at least because of a couple of things. First of all, right now what is happening is, because of the economy and everything, we are focusing on cost optimization. We are trying to cut down our cloud cost or having an optimal cloud cost.
Graviton's competitive pricing actually is helping us to do that. We are still looking, we are still trying to find out those workloads, where we need to do some cost optimization, we might still consider using Graviton. That is, again, data pipelines, raw processing, those kind of workloads.
Where raw performance isn't only the focus, is what we are trying to move it to Graviton. We are also looking into cloud-agnostic things. If there are micro services, where we are running it on top of another containerization technologies like Docker, which basically forms an abstraction from the underlying hardware.
That's what we are also trying to see if we can move those as well, because there is already a layer of abstraction. Those kind of workloads we are seeing, so we are potentially planning to move into Graviton.
press.aboutamazon.com (11/28/23): [Excerpts] AWS Unveils Next Generation AWS-Designed Chips. AWS Graviton4 is the most powerful and energy-efficient AWS processor to date for a broad range of cloud workloads.
AWS Trainium2 will power the highest performance compute on AWS for training foundation models faster and at a lower cost, while using less energy
Anthropic, Databricks, Datadog, Epic, Honeycomb, and SAP among customers using new AWS-designed chips.
Graviton history:Let’s take a quick look back in time and recap the evolution of the Graviton processors:
November 2018 – The Graviton processor made its debut in the A1 instances, optimized for both performance and cost, and delivering cost reductions of up to 45% for scale-out workloads.
December 2019 – The Graviton2 processor debuted with the announcement of M6g, M6gd, C6g, C6gd, R6g, and R6gd instances with up to 40% better price performance than equivalent non-Graviton instances. The second-generation processor delivered up to 7x performance of the first one, including twice the floating point performance.
November 2021 – The Graviton3 processor made its debut with the announcement of the compute-optimized C7g instances. In addition to up to 25% better compute performance, this generation of processors once again doubled floating point and cryptographic performance when compared to the previous generation.
November 2022 – The Graviton 3E processor was announced, for use in the Hpc7g and C7gn instances, with up to 35% higher vector instruction processing performance than the Graviton3.
Today, every one of the top 100 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) customers makes use of Graviton, choosing between more than 150 Graviton-powered instances.
Amazon says it’s going ‘water positive’ — but there’s a problem
grist.org: [Excerpt] The company’s pledge to conserve water at its data centers doesn’t account for the thirsty power plants that keep them running.
Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance. While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities.Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.
This story has been corrected to clarify that Amazon’s “water positive” pledge applies only to its web services division.
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☑️ #136 Aug 22, 2024
We have a new code transformation capability
@ajassy: One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both.
Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:
The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).
In under six months, we've been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.
The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.
This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q. It’s been a game changer for us, and not only do our Amazon teams plan to use this transformation capability more, but our Q team plans to add more transformations for developers to leverage.
Shop select Amazon ads on TikTok without leaving the app
tiktok.com: [Excerpt] Users can now seamlessly discover and purchase their favorite products from Amazon directly within the TikTok app.
Users can now seamlessly discover and purchase their favorite products from Amazon directly within the TikTok app. This shopping experience is powered by Amazon through ads placed on TikTok and allows users to complete product purchases with Amazon in TikTok’s native environment.
@moreperfectus: BREAKING: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has determined Amazon is a “distributor” of products and legally responsible for recalling items that are defective or fail safety standards.
They’ve been ordered to recall 400,000+ items including faulty carbon monoxide detectors, hair dryers, and kids’ pjs
@charliebilello (update; 7/8/24): Incredible: Amazon's AWS revenue over the last 12 months ($99 billion) was higher than the revenue of 468 companies in the S&P 500. $AMZN
In a span of just four years — 2017 through 2021 — Amazon lost $25 billion on “devices”
pxlnv.com : [Excerpt] According to Mattioli’s reporting, in a span of just four years — 2017 through 2021 — Amazon lost $25 billion on “devices”. According to SEC filings (PDF), this category would likely include things like Fire TV sticks, Ring doorbell cameras, Kindles, and Alexa products. It is unclear to me what portion of these losses can be specifically attributed to Alexa devices.
I know I am probably an outlier, but I have never understood why someone would buy anything with just their voice. I cannot think of a reason why I would buy any of these smart speakers in general, though I understand why controlling your house with your voice could be useful for a person with a disability. But buying things from the world’s most popular flea market without any control over what shows up at your door sounds horrible.
GE HealthCare and AWS announce strategic collaboration to accelerate healthcare transformation with generative AI
gehealthcare.com: [Excerpt] GE HealthCare selects AWS as its strategic cloud provider to deliver entirely new, purpose-built foundation models designed to fast-track the development of innovative healthcare applications.
GE HealthCare plans to train and deploy clinical foundation models on AWS’s machine learning and generative AI technologies to help healthcare providers expedite clinical and operational workflows to improve delivery of care.
Amazon Announces Record-Breaking Sales for 2024 Prime Day Event
press.aboutamazon.com: [Excerpt] Prime members shopped millions of deals across more than 35 categories, and purchased more items than any previous Prime Day shopping event.
Rufus, Amazon's new AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, helped millions of customers shop Amazon’s wide selection quickly and easily.
Independent sellers – most of which are small and medium-sized businesses – sold more than 200 million items during the Prime Day event.
capitalist-letters.com: Last week, I went against the flow and established that Google isn't actually cheap despite the huge untapped potential. This week, I am making a case that Amazon is actually the cheapest mega-cap.
@ZaStocks: After reading the specifics of the Bezos sales plan it looks like he isn’t selling any shares under $200. Basically every tick over $200 will need to see buyers to match Jeff’s selling until he’s done. Once that lid comes off the move will be explosive. $250-$300
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☑️ #125 Jul 8, 2024
😍 Looking for specific info?
@_jayphelps: Why spend money on a ChatGPT subscription when you can just ask Amazon.com on literally any product page?
adept.ai: [Excerpt] In addition, the Adept co-founders and some of the team are joining Amazon’s AGI organization to continue to pursue the mission of building useful general intelligence. Amazon is also licensing Adept’s agent technology, family of state-of-the-art multimodal models, and a few datasets.
disconnect.blog: [Excerpt] The ecommerce giant is continuing a race to the bottom for workers and the environment.
Shein and Temu are built on a model of unbelievably low prices and remarkably fast shipping for products made by a wide range of third-party suppliers in China. Over time, they’ve expanded their product offerings beyond staples like clothing to become more competitive in a wider range of categories. Giants like Amazon are not new to competition though. In the past, the company has taken on Diapers.com and Wayfair in their specific niches, and now it’s crafting a plan to respond to its Chinese competitors.
@EthanEvansVP: I was asked to describe my typical day as an Amazon Director and VP. My answer was short: “meetings.” That was accurate, but here I will go into more detail. This is a day in the life of an Amazon VP.
I will cover normal days, big decisions, and crisis management.
Normal Days
On “normal” days, my answer of “meetings” was pretty accurate.
As a team leader of several hundred people and several businesses with hundreds of millions in revenue, my calendar was always full and often double or triple-booked. Once I was a director, I had the luxury of an executive assistant who would try to keep my days organized.
Like many executives, I fell into a pattern of going where my EA directed me to go.
The most common types of meetings were:
--One-on-ones with my direct reports, a few skip levels, and my manager
--Team meetings, either with my own team or my manager’s team·
--Project meetings about the status of some key product or initiative
The point of all these meetings was to gather information I needed, to give information that others needed, to develop my team members, and to resolve problems with project progress.
The normal daily work of a leader is developing their team and organizing work to get things done. Since leaders do not do the work themselves, the “daily work” is meeting with others.
Big Decisions
For big decisions, we would often have several meetings over time where we gathered information about the decision.
At Amazon, this information would be turned into one of the famous six-page narratives, which would be reviewed offline and in one or more meetings for completeness and correctness.
Once ready, the document would be taken to the decision-makers and everyone would read it for about 20 minutes. Once everyone was done reading, we would discuss the information in the document. The best outcome was a clear decision that we could implement.
But, we would often realize that we needed additional information or wanted to look at different options. In this case, the team would revise the document and go through the review process again.
This process leads to good decisions, but it takes time and energy. This is why it is reserved for the most important decisions.
Crisis Management
When something goes wrong, a leader must clear their calendar to coordinate the response. In these cases, I would message my EA to “clear my calendar.” With all meetings canceled, I'd go into a “war room” with the team and focus solely on the critical issue.
I enjoyed these situations, despite the pressure, because they allowed me to focus on just one thing. I got good at crisis management, which involves:
-Clarifying the problem
-Getting the right people in the room
-Communicating status to leaders while the experts work
-Getting experts the resources they need
Leaders do other things, but these 3 “days” give a sense of the average executive day.
What questions do you have? If you are a leader, how do you spend your days?
Duke Energy wants to help Big Tech buy the 24/7 clean energy it needs
canarymedia.com: [Excerpt] The utility’s new proposal would let large corporate customers fund novel technologies like long-duration storage and advanced nuclear as they try to decarbonize.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — all of which have goals to power their operations with clean electricity — have acknowledged that simply buying wind and solar credits isn’t enough. To authentically decarbonize their operations, they need to source enough clean energy to make it through every day and night. This principle applies to society at large: The grid won’t be rid of fossil fuels until it can get reliable, clean electricity at any time of day. The trick is figuring out how to do that in today’s electricity system.
Now mega-utility Duke Energy wants to make it happen. The power provider, which serves 8.4 million customers in the Carolinas and four other states, worked with those tech giants on a novel plan to let large corporate energy consumers purchase higher levels of clean energy than previously available, all the way up to the fabled 24/7 coverage.
investors.duke-energy.com (5/29/24): [Excerpt] Responding to growing demand, Duke Energy, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nucor execute agreements to accelerate clean energy options.
The proposed Accelerating Clean Energy (ACE) tariffs would enable large customers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nucor to directly support carbon-free energy generation investments through innovative financing structures and contributions that address project risk to lower costs of emerging technologies. ACE tariffs would facilitate beneficial on-site generation at customer facilities, participation in load flexibility programs and investments in clean energy assets – features attractive to customers with large-scale energy needs.
The ACE framework also would include a Clean Transition Tariff (CTT) – the key feature enabling Duke Energy to provide individualized portfolios of new carbon-free energy to commercial and industrial customers. The CTT would match clean-energy generation and customer load to accelerate overall grid decarbonization. This would be a voluntary program for larger customers seeking to advance their clean energy goals, and it would include protections for non-participating customers.
Advanced nuclear: [Excerpt] In the U.S., dozens of companies are in various phases of developing small modular reactor and advanced reactor technologies. These technologies are expected to be available later this decade. Small modular reactors are cooled by water like traditional nuclear reactors. Advanced reactors are cooled by molten salt, helium gas or liquid metal. Some advanced reactors also provide thermal storage that saves energy to be used when customers need it most. Small modular reactors are one of the most promising emerging technologies capable of producing 50-300 megawatts of carbon-free energy and offering many safety, environmental and economic benefits. Advanced reactors also show promise, but they currently have more timeline uncertainty due to differences in regulatory requirements, technology maturity and fuel availability. Duke Energy plans to build advanced nuclear technologies in the 2030s and beyond to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Nuclear power is the only carbon-free energy source that is always on and available 24 hours a day while also complementing renewables like solar and wind power.
@TerraPowerLLC: The Natrium reactor is a 345-megawatt advanced nuclear reactor coupled with a grid-scale energy storage system. It provides carbon-free energy and seamlessly integrates into power networks with high levels of renewables. The Natrium technology offers enhanced safety features, minimizes waste production, uses fuel more efficiently and lowers costs with a streamlined design.
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☑️ #118 May 22, 2024
AWS plans to invest €15.7 billion in Spain, supporting 17,500 jobs annually in local businesses
aboutamazon.eu: [Excerpt] AWS’s investments are estimated to contribute €21.6 billion to Spain’s total GDP through 2033.
AWS will expand its cloud infrastructure in Aragón with the support of the regional government, and 40% of the estimated 6,800 jobs will be located in Aragón. Jobs will be supported across industries including construction, facilities maintenance, engineering, and telecommunications. In addition to jobs, over half (€12.9 billion) of the anticipated GDP contribution will come from the Aragón region.
7th Choose France Summit: Amazon and Microsoft to spend billions in France
@France24_en: The 7th annual foreign investment summit known as "Choose France" kicks off at Versailles with €15 billion in new projects expected. Also in this edition, China prepares a $140 billion debt float to fund economic stimulus. Plus, hundreds of environmental activists storm Tesla's German Gigafactory.
businesswire.com: [Transcription] WILMINGTON, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Air Transport Services Group, Inc. (ATSG.NaE), a leading provider of medium wide-body cargo aircraft leasing, air cargo transportation and related services, today announced an agreement to operate ten additional Boeing 767 freighters for Amazon.com Services LLC in the Amazon Air network by the end of 2024. The operating agreement through which ATSG’s airlines operate those aircraft will be extended to May 2029, with extension rights for five additional years.
“We’re pleased to further expand our leading role in the Amazon Air network that we started in 2016,” said Joe Hete, Chairman and CEO of ATSG. “Our operating capabilities will continue to support Amazon’s customer-centric commitments for years to come.”
Key features of the new and amended agreements include:
ATSG airlines to operate the initial ten Boeing 767-300 freighters provided by Amazon beginning in Summer 2024, with the potential to add up to ten more aircraft.
Operating agreement extended to May 2029, with the option to extend for an additional five years.
ATSG has also agreed to extend the exercise period for vested warrants for 21.8 million shares it previously issued to Amazon, amend the vesting conditions and extend the exercise period for unvested existing warrants for 2.9 million shares, and issued new warrants for up to 2.9 million additional shares to Amazon.
Introducing our first airplane (8/4/16): [Transcription] [Excerpt] Now, we see the same opportunity to innovate in transportation. I'm very excited to introduce Amazon One, a Boeing 767-300 that is our first ever Amazon branded plane which will serve customers by adding capacity to support one and two day package delivery in the US. Adding capacity for Prime members by developing a dedicated air cargo network ensures there is enough available capacity to provide customers with great selection, low prices and incredible shipping speeds for years to come. Over the next couple of years, we’ll roll out 40 planes just like this one.
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☑️ #115 May 2, 2024
AI demand drives Amazon’s biggest cloud sales growth in a year
bloomberg.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit posted the strongest sales growth in a year, a sign that the retailer’s most profitable unit is recovering from a slump as businesses resume spending on technology projects, including artificial intelligence services.
“We’re seeing strong demand signals from our customers on the AWS side,”
“They’re signing longer deals with larger commitments, many with generative AI components.”
Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky
Olsavsky said generative artificial intelligence now represented a “multi-billion dollar revenue run rate business” for Amazon, the first time the company has publicly put even an approximate figure on that franchise.
An Amazon spokesperson called the CMA’s probe into this type of partnership with Anthropic is "unprecedented"
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☑️ #113 Apr 22, 2024
Prime Air: Amazon drone delivery is coming to Arizona
aboutamazon.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Later this year, Amazon customers in the West Valley Phoenix Metro Area can receive Prime Air drone deliveries from our Tolleson, AZ, Same-Day Delivery site.
[Update] Amazon drones can now fly farther and deliver to more customers following FAA approval (5/30/24): [Excerpt] We submitted crucial engineering information to the FAA, including our onboard detect-and-avoid capabilities. This included how our system was designed, how it is operated, how it is maintained, and ultimately how we validated that the system performs to specified requirements. We then conducted flight demonstrations in the presence of FAA inspectors to show our system works in real-world scenarios—we flew in the presence of real planes, helicopters, and a hot air balloon to demonstrate how the drone safely navigated away from each of them. We also provided extensive analysis and test data for our technology that further validated the safety of our system. After reviewing this information and observing the technology in action at our test site, the FAA provided Amazon Prime Air with BVLOS approval.
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☑️ #112 Apr 12, 2024
AWS hedges its bets with NVDIA GPUs and homegrown AI chips
nextplatform.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] There was a time – and it doesn’t seem like that long ago – that the datacenter chip market was a big-money but relatively simple landscape, with CPUs from Intel and AMD and Arm looking to muscle its way in and GPUs mostly from Nvidia with some from AMD and Intel looking to muscle its way in. And a slew of AI startups that didn’t really sell much into the datacenter.
For AWS, it has its own Trainium (for training AI workloads obviously) and Inferentia (for AI inferencing obviously) – not to mention its Graviton CPUs and Nitro DPUs, all thanks to its 2015 acquisition of Israeli chip designer Annapurna. AWS has a lot of Nvidia GPUs, too, which are cornerstones of AI compute. But the rise of AI – and most recently, the accelerating innovation and adoption of the emerging generative AI technology – is creating a fluid processor environment that the company and other cloud providers will have to navigate.
The largest technology transformation since the cloud
finchat_io: $AMZN "Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet." - Andy Jassy, CEO
Leaked document: Amazon expects to save $1.3 billion by slashing office vacancies, terminating leases early, and other moves
businessinsider.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] To get there, Amazon is letting certain leases naturally expire, stopping the use of some office floors, and negotiating early lease terminations for some buildings, the person said. They asked not to be identified, citing private matters.
"We're constantly evaluating our real-estate portfolio based on the dynamic and diverse needs of Amazon's businesses by looking at trends in how employees are using our offices,"
"In some cases, employees may move buildings to increase collaboration and drive better utilization of our workspaces. In other cases, we may take on additional space where we're currently limited or make adjustments where we have excess capacity. The changes we've already made are improving vacancy rates, and we expect to see further progress as we continue to learn and iterate on our portfolio."
Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic
aboutamazon.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Amazon and Anthropic deepen their shared commitment to advancing generative AI.
Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion.
Amazon Pharmacy now offers Same-Day Delivery in New York City and the L.A. area. Here’s how AI is helping us deliver medication faster.
aboutamazon.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Same-Day Delivery will expand to more than a dozen cities by the end of the year using environmentally friendly delivery vehicles, including e-bikes, electric vans, and drones.
Amazon Tells Warehouse Workers to Close Their Eyes and Think Happy Thoughts
404media.co: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Amazon is telling workers to close their eyes and dream of being somewhere else while they’re standing in a warehouse. A worker in one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers, who we’ve granted anonymity, sent 404 Media a photo they took of a screen imploring them to try “savoring” the idea of something that makes them happy—as in, not being at work, surrounded by robots and packages.
Amazon just bought a massive data center under construction right at one of America's best nuclear plants.
Operating costs for the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania are crazy low - likely around $25 per MWh.
Why is this a huge nuclear signal?
Until recently, Jeff Bezos was giving immense funding to enviro org NRDC, a group that has been trying to destroy American nuclear power plants.
NRDC succeeded at Indian Point, so New York City now runs on just natural gas and diesel. They almost succeeded at Diablo Canyon in California.
Amazon is bigger than Jeff, true. And Bezos may not have known the America-sabotaging dirty energy mission his money was supporting at NRDC, which only cut their anti-nuclear program late last year according to insiders.
But unlike Microsoft which has long had a pro-nuclear founder in Bill Gates, a stated interest in purchasing clean nuclear electricity, and even a nuclear power program, Amazon has been silent on nuclear.
Even Google has been louder than Amazon, saying 24/7 clean energy from nuclear would probably be an important clean energy resource in the future.
So by buying a data center that uses nearly HALF of a massive nuclear plant's output, Amazon is effectively announcing that they're a nuclear-powered company.
This is colossal for the "Nuclear Energy as ESG" story.
The major tech companies, which are essentially all entirety of the ESG sector, were avoiding buying nuclear power, instead misleading the public for years about using 100% renewable even though they knew it wasn't true.
Now, in order to accept the tech giants as ESG, major financial groups and the ESG ratings agencies that work with them will have to accept that these companies are openly powering themselves with zero-emission nuclear energy.
With the power demand for data centers soaring, and the major companies like Microsoft and Amazon now openly buying nuclear power to meet their needs, we are in the beginning of a new nuclear age.
Will the nuclear industry be able to meet this demand? That's the next challenge
🔹Related content:
Talen Energy Announces Sale of Zero-Carbon Data Center Campus: [Transcription] [Excerpt] HOUSTON, March 4, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Talen Energy Corporation ("Talen") (OTCQX: TLNE) today issued the following statement regarding the sale of its 960-megawatt Cumulus data center campus in northeast Pennsylvania to a major cloud service provider. Read more
theatlantic.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Nearly 30 years after the company was founded, we still don’t really know where its profits come from. The answer will loom large in the antitrust case against it.
But here’s something you won’t find in those materials, because it was deemed too sensitive to unredact: precisely how Amazon makes its money. Nearly 30 years after the company was founded, we still don’t really know. Amazon has long cultivated the impression that it operates its shopping platform at razor-thin margins, relying instead on its cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), for much of its profit.
And yet the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit contends that Amazon’s e-commerce business is, in fact, “enormously profitable.” The resolution to this dispute is likely to figure heavily in whether the judge finds that Amazon is merely a benevolent retail giant or a destructive monopoly. And regardless of what happens in the Amazon case, the fact that large corporations have been able to keep such basic information private helps explain why policy makers, journalists, and the public were so slow to recognize the growing problem of monopolization in America.
@AgilityRobotics : Digit will first be tested at Amazon’s robotics research and development facility just south of Seattle. This development broadens the relationship between the two companies, as Agility is already part of the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. At Agility, we make robots that are made for work. Our robot Digit works alongside us in spaces designed for people. Digit handles the tedious and repetitive tasks meant for a machine, allowing companies and their people to focus on the work that requires the human element.
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☑️ #103 Feb 20, 2024
Amazon.com Set to Join Dow Jones Industrial Average; Uber to Join Dow Jones Transportation Average
press.spglobal.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- S&P Dow Jones Indices will make the following changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and Dow Jones Transportation Average (DJTA) effective prior to the open of trading on Monday, February 26:
Amazon.com Inc. (NASD:AMZN) will replace Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. (NASD:WBA) in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Reflecting the evolving nature of the American economy, this change will increase consumer retail exposure as well as other business areas in the DJIA. The index change was prompted by DJIA constituent Walmart Inc.'s (NYSE:WMT) decision to split its stock 3:1, which will reduce Walmart's index weight due to the price weighted construction of the index. Walmart will remain in the DJIA.
The Sandbox Daily: [Transcription] [Excerpt] The timing of the index swap, though, may be less than ideal. Over the last year, Amazon is up +78% while Walgreens is down 39%. Investors who passively invest by ETFs or major announcements will be effectively selling low and buying high. Many have been quick to quip about the 2020 Dow roster changes when the Dow booted Exxon Mobil and added Salesforce.com after a nearly identical price performance setup.
sec.gov: [Transcription] [Summarizer] FORM 4 - Statement of changes in beneficial ownership of securities.
Bezos has reached his previously disclosed plan to sell up to 50 million shares by the end of January 2025, following the latest transactions (automatic sells)
One of Oregon’s smallest utilities is suddenly among the state’s biggest polluters. Why? Amazon data centers
oregonlive.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] The Umatilla Electric Cooperative is responsible for 1.8 million tons of carbon emissions annually, according to newly released state data, even though it has just 16,000 customers. It’s now the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases among all Oregon utilities because of one of those customers: Amazon.
Umatilla Electric Company: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Umatilla Electric Cooperative is a member-owned business that sells energy and invests in and supports other services to improve the quality of life in our communities.
