Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy on Wednesday reported on the enormous new Amazon data center the tech giant recently brought online in Indiana. On social media, Jassy wrote “About a year ago, this site near South Bend, Indiana was just cornfields. Today, it’s 1 of our U.S. data centers powering Project Rainier – one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters, built in collaboration with @AnthropicAI.”
Sharing a video of the exterior and interior of the data center (below), Jassy added: “It is 70% larger than any AI computing platform in #AWS history, with nearly 500K Trainium2 chips, and is now fully operational with Anthropic actively using it to train and run inference for its industry-leading AI model, Claude (providing 5X+ the compute they used to train their previous AI models). We expect Claude to be on more than 1 million Trainium2 chips by the end of year. Will help enable the next generation of AI innovation as we further extend our infrastructure leadership.”
About a year ago, this site near South Bend, Indiana was just cornfields. Today, it’s 1 of our U.S. data centers powering Project Rainier – one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters, built in collaboration with @AnthropicAI.
It is 70% larger than any AI computing platform… pic.twitter.com/V7PzIqMTA4
— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) October 29, 2025
Jassy’s “just cornfields” remark is getting slammed on social media, with the Amazon CEO — whose compensation reportedly topped $40 million last year — being portrayed as tone deaf and out of touch with Americans.
As one X user replied, “I need to correct the record here on the ‘just cornfields’ remark, because such disregard for land and place by corporations is already a grave threat to humanity, and will continue to be so.”
Catherine Fitts, former Wall Street executive and U.S. Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the George H.W. Bush presidency, replied to Jassy: “Just cornfields? Ever try living without food?”
Nick Schmidt, co-founder of TraderLion and Deepvue, replied, “I like cornfields.” And another commenter asked, “How much is the utility bill?”
While running for president in 2024, President Trump promised to cut electric bills in half within 18 months of taking office. But ten months into his second term, headlines like “Soaring electricity bills are squeezing households as utilities seek higher rates” are common.
Many Democrats blame the higher costs on Trump’s shuttering of renewable energy projects like wind and solar power, while others blame the “rapid spread of energy-hungry data centers.”
[Note: Reasons for the rising cost of utilities for U.S. households and businesses vary, but data centers and the strain they can put on the grid are a big part of the national discussion, with energy prices being a major topic in big political elections including the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia.]
Geoffrey Blanford of the non-profit organization Electric Power Research Institution, said: “Part of the problem is that you can often build new data centers faster than you can build new power plants to supply them.” He added, “And that bottleneck can really drive up costs in the short term.”
Note: During the first Trump administration, Jassy was a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) which issued a report in March 2021 warning that China could soon replace the U.S. as the world’s “AI superpower” and emphasizing the serious military implications to consider as a result.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who led NSCAI at the time, wrote: “America is not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era.”