‘Big Tech is desperate’: Amazon engineers are calling out the tech giant for its $200 billion in data center spending after slashing 30,000 workers

A man in a crowd holds a sign that says, "Moratorium NOW!" (Credit: Will Waldron/Albany Times Union—Getty Images)

A group of Amazon engineers spoke out against unfettered data center construction, calling out their own employer for pouring money into AI infrastructure while slashing headcount. The employees pointed out the hypocrisy between the company spending billions to build these infrastructure projects, all the while laying off thousands in anticipation of the AI agents these data centers would power to replace them.

“It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, said at a Seattle Land Use and Sustainability Committee hearing on Wednesday. He was one of three Amazon employees who made comments supporting increased regulation of local data center development.