The cloud has a postcode. And right now, it looks a lot like Indiana farmland…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently converting 1,200 acres of rural land into an $11 billion data centre campus. They are planting half a million of their own ‘Trainium 2’ chips where corn used to grow.
The entire site has been built with a single mission: to power Anthropic in its race against OpenAI.
We often talk about this rivalry as if it exists purely in code. But if you stand in that field in Indiana, you see the physical reality of the Exponential Age.
It consumes land. It drinks water. It demands gigawatts of power.
This is steel, copper and concrete, colonising the American midwest at a speed not seen since the railway boom.
The interface is digital. The footprint is stubbornly physical.
