A group of Amazon engineers have stood up against their own employer at a Seattle City Council hearing, criticising tech giants for pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure while simultaneously slashing thousands of human staff. According to a report by Fortune, the workers pointed out an ‘irony’: Big Tech companies are spending historical amounts of capital to build data centres, all to power the very AI agents designed to replace the workers they are laying off.“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 (AWS), testified during a Seattle Land Use and Sustainability Committee hearing this week.
Amazon employee also attacks Microsoft
Schloesser was one of three Amazon employees who attended the local hearing to demand stricter regulations on data centre developments. “Microsoft is spending $190 billion. Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months,” Schloesser told the committee, adding, “What that tells me is that Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can, as fast as it can.”Following the public outcry from tech workers and local residents over proposals to build five large-scale data complexes around the city, the Seattle City Council took action. The council voted in favour of a yearlong ban on local data centre construction. This temporary halt will give the city more time to draft proper environmental and zoning regulations for AI infrastructure growth.
What Amazon has to say to employee outcry
In response to the hearing, Amazon stated that it currently has no plans to construct data centres within the actual city limits of Seattle, and remains committed to local economic development as well as is working to improve water and energy efficiency across its infrastructure projects.“We respect our colleagues’ right to voice their opinions,” Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told Fortune. She added, “We engage regularly with community stakeholders to understand local priorities and address concerns transparently, supporting both technological innovation and the specific needs of each region where we operate.”