AI's Power Hunger Threatens Internet Reliability After AWS Outage

AI's growing power needs could lead to more outages. The recent AWS incident shows we need to prepare for disruptions to critical services.

, and Administrator

2025 October 22 . 2:03 PM

1 min read

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AI's Power Hunger Threatens Internet Reliability After AWS Outage

Monday's Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage served as a stark reminder of the internet's reliance on a few core infrastructure providers. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly central to work and daily life, the power-hungry nature of AI could lead to more frequent data center outages, potentially disrupting critical services like healthcare and finance.

AI's growing prevalence is not limited to tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which together service around 70% of the cloud computing market and are prominent providers for AI applications. Other significant players include Alibaba and Tencent from China, as well as CoreWeave, which rents advanced Nvidia GPUs and has major contracts with Meta and OpenAI. AWS, for instance, serves millions of customers and holds around 37% of the market.

As AI continues to permeate various aspects of life and work, the risk of outages from power-hungry AI applications becomes more pronounced. The recent AWS outage serves as a wake-up call for businesses and providers alike to invest in resilience and redundancy to ensure the reliability of critical services.