Internal emails have unveiled that Amazon has embarked on a bold new project, dubbed the "Early Rack Receipt" initiative, aimed at amassing a vast reserve of computing power. Under this ambitious plan, Amazon is set to proactively acquire NVIDIA GB300 server racks, with an estimated value of around $5 billion, and station them across its U.S. data centers. Moreover, the company envisions continuing this hardware purchasing spree at a staggering rate of $3 billion per month in the foreseeable future.
In a departure from its usual cautious approach, Amazon has opted to complete substantial hardware acquisitions prior to ensuring that the power infrastructure and operational conditions in its data centers are fully prepared. As a result, at present, a significant portion of the NVIDIA GPU devices procured early on are languishing in transit warehouses, idle due to the inadequate power capacity at numerous AWS locations. These "dark GPU" resources, as they are now known, represent a paradoxical situation where companies have invested heavily in AI chips and servers, only to find themselves unable to utilize them due to power supply constraints or system design flaws.