314: Vector? I Hardly Know Her! S3’s New AI Storage Play

Welcome to episode 314 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt and Ryan, are holding down the fort in Justin’s absence and bringing what’s left of our audience (those of you still here after the last time they were left in charge) the latest and greatest in cloud and tech news. We’ve got undersea cables, vector storage, and even some hobos – but not the kind on trains. Plus, AWS S3 gets its Vector Victor. Let’s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• S3 Gets Direction: AWS Points to Vector Storage
• Vector? I Hardly Know Her! S3’s New AI Storage Play
• S3 Finds Its Magnitude and Direction
• Claude Goes to Wall Street
• Anthropic’s Bull Run Into Financial Services
• AI Assistant Gets Its Series 7 License
• Nova Scotia: AWS Brings Regional Flavor to AI Models
• The Fine-Tuning of the Shrew: Teaching Nova Models New Tricks
• Nova-caine: Numbing the Pain of Model Customization
• AgentCore Blimey: AWS Gives AI Agents Their License to Scale
• The Agent Infrastructure: Mission Deployable
• From Zero to Agent Hero: AWS Tackles the Production Problem
• SageMaker Gets Its Data Act Together
• From Catalog to QuickSight: A Data Love Story
• The Great Data Unification of 2024
• AWS Free Tier Gets a $200 Makeover
• EKS-treme Makeover: Cluster Edition
• #⃣100K Nodes Walk Into a Cluster…
• S3 Gets Direction: Amazon Points to Vector Storage
• Amazon S3: Now with 90% Less Vector Bills and 100% More Dimensions

Follow Up

01:03 SoftBank and OpenAI’s $500 Billion AI Project Struggles to Get Off Ground

• The $500 billion AI effort unveiled at the White House has struggled to get off the ground and has scaled back its near-term plans. 
• It’s been six months since the announcement, where they said they would spend $100B almost immediately, but now they have a more modest goal of building a small data center by the end of the year in Ohio.
• Softbank committed to $30 billion earlier this year, and it is one of the largest ever startup investments by them, which led them to take on new debt and sell assets.  
• This investment was made alongside Stargate, giving them a role in the physical infrastructure needed for AI. 
• Altman, though, has been eager to secure computing power as quickly as possible and has proceeded without Softbank. 
• Publicly, they say it’s a great partnership, and they look forward to advancing projects in multiple states
• Oracle was part of Stargate, but the recent 30B deal just signed with includes a commitment of 4.5 gigawatts of capacity, and would consume the equivalent power of more than two Hoover Dams, or about 4 million homes. 
• Oracle was also named part of the deal with UAE firm MGX as a partner, but Oracle CEO Safra Catz said that Stargate hadn’t been formed yet, as of last month. 

02:31 Matthew – “…everyone’s like, how hard can it be to build a data center? But it’s city zoning, power consumption, grid improveme