Project Overview

AWS Project Rainier is a USD 11 billion hyperscale AI data center campus and supercomputer cluster located in New Carlisle, Indiana. The site became operational in October 2025. This was less than 1 year after its announcement at AWS re: Invent in December 2024. It marks the industry's fastest large-scale data center deployment.

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The facility is designed to support Anthropic. Anthropic is an AI company that develops advanced large language models like Claude, while embedding AI safety research as its core differentiator. At its core, the campus houses nearly 500,000 AWS Trainium2 chips.

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It is the company’s second-generation custom AI training accelerator. These are interconnected via proprietary NeuronLink cables and petabit-scale Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking. AWS and Anthropic expect the chip count to reach one million Trainium2 units by the end of 2025.

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In total, the facility comprises 30 data center buildings. Each building exceeds 200,000 square feet. Together, they draw a combined 2.2 gigawatts of electricity. In Phase I, the facility has seven buildings in operation.

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On 24 November 2025, Amazon announced an additional USD 15 billion investment in new data center campuses across Northwest Indiana. This brings the combined committed investment across Phase 1 and Phase 2 to over USD 26 billion. Construction on Phase II is planned to begin in 2026.

AWS Project Rainier Location

AWS Project Rainier is located in northwestern Indiana, USA. The site is centered on New Carlisle in St. Joseph County, near South Bend and close to Lake Michigan.

Technical Specifications

Project Background

Project Rainier originated in 2023 after OpenAI's ChatGPT launched and triggered the current generative AI investment cycle. AWS began inspecting land in rural Indiana. The team worked with American Electric Power, through its Indiana Michigan Power subsidiary, to identify a site with sufficient power capacity for a multi-gigawatt AI campus.

Amazon made its first investment of USD 1.25 billion in Anthropic in September 2023. In early 2024, Amazon invested a further USD 2.75 billion. This was followed by USD 1.3 billion later that year. By late 2024, Amazon committed an additional USD 4 billion, bringing its total stake in Anthropic to USD 8 billion. This surpasses Google's USD 3 billion investment. As part of the investment terms, AWS became Anthropic's primary training partner and cloud provider.

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AWS formally signed the USD 11 billion agreement with the State of Indiana in April 2024. This locked in the state's largest-ever capital commitment from a private company. St. Joseph County officials approved a comprehensive incentives package. This included a 50-year sales tax exemption on capital investment and an 85 percent exemption on personal property tax. Despite these concessions, AWS is still projected to pay over USD 722 million in taxes over 35 years. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) approved incentives in August 2024.

Physical construction began in September 2024. AWS brought on four general contractors simultaneously. The company updated building designs midway through construction to accelerate deployment. Project Rainier was publicly announced at the AWS re: Invent conference in Las Vegas in December 2024.

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The Indiana Department of Environmental Management issued a temporary halt order earlier in 2025 over unauthorized impacts to wetlands at the New Carlisle site. Amazon confirmed in January 2026 that it was working with regulatory bodies on revised applications and mitigation efforts.

Key Stakeholders Details

AWS Project Rainier Current Status

As of April 2026, AWS Project Rainier is fully operational and in active production. Rapid scaling is still underway across the Indiana-centric campus and the broader AWS footprint.

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The Indiana St. Joseph County campus (New Carlisle) is designed for 30 buildings totaling about 2.2 GW of IT load, with Aterio and other trackers noting that 7 of 18 buildings in Phase 1 are already active, and Phase 2 construction is expected to start by 2026.

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AWS has positioned Project Rainier as its largest AI‑infrastructure project to date, a “vertically integrated AI factory” anchored by Anthropic and powered by the Trainium2‑based UltraServer / UltraCluster architecture.

On 24 November 2025, Amazon announced a USD 15 billion Phase 2 expansion across Northwest Indiana. This move was formalized in partnership with the State of Indiana, IEDC, and NIPSCO. In January 2026, officials confirmed plans to begin construction on new campuses in 2026. The existing New Carlisle facilities aim for full operational status by the end of 2025.

AWS Project Rainier Cost Details

Project Scope

The following is the project scope of the Project Rainier:

• AI supercomputing cluster: The facility creates one of the largest AI compute clusters. It is built around nearly 500,000 custom AWS Trainium2 AI chips, with plans to reach over 1 million chips.
  

• Vertically integrated AI stacks: Develop a full-stack AI training infrastructure. This stack is built on AWS-designed Trainium2 chips, Amazon EC2 UltraServers, and Amazon EC2 UltraClusters.
  

• Primary AI Hub: Project Rainier runs across many AWS data center locations in the U.S., with the Indiana-centric campus serving as the primary AI hub.
  

• AI-model Support: The facility provides AI infrastructure for Anthropic to train and run large-scale Claude-family models. It offers roughly five times the previous training capacity.
  

• Energy efficiency & sustainability goals: The goal is to support the long-term scalability and sustainability of AWS's clusters and data centers. Engineers design them for high performance per watt
  

Project Timeline

Benefits

The following are the benefits of the project:

• Fast AI training & deployment: Trainium2 chip design boosts training cycles by up to several times compared to traditional GPU setups. This reduces time-to-market for new AI models
  

• Reduce AI-infrastructure costs: Vertical integration (chips, servers, software, and cloud services) maximizes productivity and reduces per‑compute‑unit costs for customers using Project Rainier‑backed EC2 UltraClusters and Bedrock.
  

• High performance using less power: Trainium2-based systems and optimized data-center design improve compute-per-watt. This supports AWS’s sustainability goals while maintaining high performance.
  

• Strong AI-stack integration: Control over the full stack (chip, firmware, servers, software, and power/cooling) enables AWS to tightly tune the system for large‑scale, low‑latency AI workloads.
  

• Economic benefits: Investment in the facility creates multiple job opportunities during both construction and operational phases. This boosts the overall economy.  
  

• Infrastructure benefits: The facility provides long-term tax and infrastructure benefits to both the local and state economies.
  

• Increased resilience and redundancy: The dispersed, multi‑site UltraCluster architecture improves fault tolerance and operational resilience for mission‑critical AI workloads.

Conclusion

AWS Project Rainier is a hyperscale AI Data Center project. It is marked as one of the world’s largest AI supercomputers, optimized for training and running next-generation models like Anthropic’s Claude family at scale. The project combines custom silicon, ultra-dense compute clusters, and cloud-native services into a single vertically integrated platform.

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It positions AWS as a leading infrastructure layer for enterprise-grade AI through services like Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker. The project deploys hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips across a 2.2-GW-scale Indiana-centric campus. It delivers multiple benefits, focusing on performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness for AI workloads.

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Overall, Project Rainier builds a foundational pillar of AWS’s AI‑first cloud strategy, setting a new benchmark for how cloud providers build and operate AI‑specific infrastructure at a global scale. Furthermore, it aligns with broader sustainability and infrastructure‑modernization goals.

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