Hi, I'm Jeff Rea, your host for Economic Outlook.

Thank you for joining us.

Each week as we discuss the region's most important economic development initiatives with a panel of experts.

Earlier this season, we introduced you to the AWS project in western Saint Joseph County, the largest single economic development project in the state's history.

Today, we'll hear more about that project from the company, making the investment as AWS executives.

Join me for an update.

Last spring, Amazon Web Services announced plans for an $11 billion investment in data centers in Saint Joseph County.

Since then, the project is advancing with several buildings nearing completion on the data center campus.

Today, we're taking a closer look at the project and the company making the investment.

AWS or Amazon Web Services?

Joining me for that conversation are Sam Markman, the economic development manager with AWS, and Hilary Lambert, a director of economic development at AWS.

Welcome, ladies.

Thank you for being here, having us.

We're excited to have you.

So we kind of feature the project a little bit ago when we did the official groundbreaking last spring, and with governor and all those those kind of things.

But we're excited to have AWS in our community.

So we appreciate you being here a little bit.

Maybe first, just to start quick introduction.

Hilary, tell us about your role at AWS.

So I lead the economic development project management team and which Sam is a part of.

And we are the fortunate team who get to work with communities at the state and local level throughout the US and the world, really to look at opportunities to invest.

And so we're we're fortunate enough to have found this lovely community and have had a phenomenal partnership.

Well, thank you for.

And Sam, tell us about your role.

Yeah.

So I'm on the economic Well-Being project management team.

I am the local point of contact for the Indiana Project and really excited to continue the great partnership in Saint Joseph County.

But in addition to that, support, not only our existing region work like we have here, but some of our expansion opportunities across the country as well.

Great.

Well, we're excited to dive a little bit deeper, Hilary, talk a little bit about, high level AWS.

So so it's somebody that you know everybody and I'll be honest, like the question most people ask is if you're gonna deliver packages from there.

And I said, no, no, it's it's different help people understand AWS and what it is.

You know, it's a very good question and understandable.

Of course.

You know, really it's, as Amazon.com, the retail store was building up, we learned very first hand how expensive and challenging it can be to invest in infrastructure, IT infrastructure of any scale, and how important it is to keep that up to speed with the latest security and technology, etc.. And so around 2006, I think it was, we decided, why wouldn't we open that up and let others benefit from the experience on the scale that we had built to support.com?

And that really was the growth of AWS or the birth of AWS rather, and and just sharing what our expertise was with customers.

I mean, everything from a student in the college classroom to a huge multinational can have the benefit of infrastructure immediately available.

Without that upfront expenditure and management and center for a second, just about, your path into what was it that, that brought you to, to a position or a role at AWS?

Yeah, I, I always find it fun because people take such a circuitous path to these roles.

And I started with AWS about a year and a half ago.

And I come from a background in, in the infrastructure space, actually, most recently working for, investor owned electric utility company, and so was no stranger to kind of what it took to the backbone of these great projects and really kind of getting some of that infrastructure in place.

I have always kind of traditionally been in economic development.

And so I did economic development with the utility.

And then prior to that, it actually worked for a county and a city in local economic development.

And so it's kind of fun to be sitting across the table with communities that I've been in their shoes and know what it takes to kind of do some of these things.

And, really excited about now being able to represent it from the project side.

I saw it as an opportunity to kind of round out that sphere of economic development, having a local experience, utility experience, and now really the customer experience.

Hillary.

So my question talk about your path to AWS.

Yeah, absolutely.

And mine is circuitous, especially to the economic development role.

I mean, one of the things that Sam highlights really well is how we built the economic development team first and foremost, and that is really a combination of different backgrounds and different skill sets.

So we have maybe half the team who come from more traditional economic development practitioner experience than the other have major infrastructure experience.

And so we're all kind of melding those skills to work in the communities.

Myself, I've been with AWS now almost 12 years, so a long time or for most of us at the company and I came initially more on the business development side and interconnect facilities globally.

So I've had in my career the opportunity to always be in tech and be on one side of the table with the investment, but never have had the opportunity prior to this role, which has been about 6 or 7 years now, to really see the value of those investments and the impact they can make in community.

So I feel very fortunate to have found this colleague.

So, so AWS and other companies as well are doing data centers across the country.

They're getting a lot of attention.

Can you talk a little bit about just why the why the need why the explosion?

Why, why, why right now?

Or is there such a need for data centers?

Well, I'm sure many watching of heard of AI and ML, right.

Yeah.

That is that is largely a huge component obviously of the explosion and, and utility.

And I think there is, just a pivot point in the industry overall in terms of compute.

And none of us are walking away from these at anytime soon.

So that really has been a major driver and opened up other opportunities that we frankly didn't have at the hyperscale level historically.

And and I think every time we connect to the internet, send an email, you know, Hillary mentioned cell phones.

We're more connected, as, you know, individuals, as corporations than we are ever before.

And I think a lot of times I know people in my life, specifically when I took on this role that said, oh, well, I thought that just lives in the cloud.

Like, what is the cloud, right?

And in all reality, they're physical infrastructure spaces for while buildings with, you know, massive compute power happening inside of them.

That because of the demand that we see in those spaces, the need to really kind of build out that physical infrastructure piece as well.

Yeah.

Great.

So as we're so as AWS has this need to kind of expand to meet the needs of growing AI, you've got to go through this, thought process of, thinking about building some data centers and where it strategically makes sense, you know?

So talk to us a little bit about just kind of the factors that go into thinking about or siting a data center.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, obviously there are the, the rather, you know, somewhat obvious infrastructure opportunities for power and water and land, really first and foremost.

And again, that's what we are so fortunate to be on the front end is finding a community that really wants to partner with us long term, and that this is the right kind of investment for that community.

And we see the opportunity to grow together and make that a, a mutually beneficial, investment for both sides.

So let's build on that a little bit.

So, so as you're, kind of putting this funnel together to kind of try to figure out where this goes.

And I, and I just think generally, the Midwest and Indiana have both, scored very well in this space.

There's a lot of investment, you know, talk to about, you know, why, why the Midwest and Indiana are attractive for investments like the investment you're making.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure it's no shock with these economic development projects.

We come into communities far before wherever, like with these sorts of projects.

And it's really about building that partnership from an early, an early point.

And a lot of times when we're headed into these, what we call new regions, it's working with the state and the state partnership.

And so the Indiana Economic Development Corporation was a critical function and kind of bringing us in the door and really kind of understanding some of those opportunities which Saint Joseph County so kindly answered the call to, and really kind of understanding how we could build on that local partnership.

We have to find physical sites to site this infrastructure.

And as Hillary mentioned, understanding the backbone infrastructure that's there to support that, in addition to the cost associated with those, too, the cost to power becomes some of our largest from an operations perspective.

And really finding competitive advantages that way.

But when we think about the partnership that the community brought, I think since day one, you know, really kind of whether it was meeting us out on the site and understanding what that would look like to working through what our team owns is the incentive negotiation process and really bringing all the partners, whether it was the board of commissioners, the county council, the redevelopment Commission.

I mean, like I said, everyone really answered that call of action to what it was going to take to land this project here.

We have a great relationship with Bill Kaleo, the county economic development director, and really kind of understanding what it was going to take, for both parties for this project to be a success.

We know that we can come in and do some things.

And in a lot of ways, you know, we think about our infrastructure and siting our infrastructure in kind of one way, but we want the community to challenge us in those ways and really understand how we meet their needs and their demands and how we can help kind of bring the community to the next level in some of that partnership.

And we've just really enjoyed the opportunity working with the county and in here in Saint Joseph County to make that happen.

And projects of this scale and complexity.

They're not small, short term.

And so we certainly look at that as a very long term opportunity to be in the community and beyond the build out, which is phenomenal.

We just drove by yesterday morning and phenomenal, we need partners who can work with us because the complexity we're going to have challenges that arise and being able to work through those together successfully for the long term is hugely important.

Right?

Seamless dive maybe into more some more specifics.

So I think what we talked about before with the governor and Kevin from AWS and others, you know, with us, but, help remind our viewers about the project that's being built here in Saint John County and some of the things that they still expect to see out there.

Absolutely.

And so at the groundbreaking announcement, we were proud to announce the $11 billion capital investment that would have come alongside that infrastructure build, the largest certainly here for Saint Joseph County, but also the state of Indiana.

We also, as we would say in Amazonian terms, with, with great success comes broad responsibility and really kind of understanding what that looks like for these communities.

And so, the capital investment was certainly a component of it.

We also announced that that would come with at least a thousand jobs.

And I think that's an important point to hit on as well.

Those aren't necessarily short term construction jobs.

When you hear numbers like that, I think people often think that they're, you know, come in, build the thing and move on.

But that thousand number really, really represents our long term operations.

What we will see at that to maintain these physical data centers, for the long duration of what we would build as a legacy facility here.

And so really kind of understanding how we can continue to grow that local workforce and really represent those thousand jobs.

And, of course, that'll come with a way that the business is expanding.

Right now, we're we're seeing multiple individual data centers on a singular campus location.

And that's what we're going to see here in Saint Joseph County.

Hillary mentioned we drove by the site just yesterday.

And I'll be honest, even for us, we're moving at a monumental pace.

Every time I come back to the community, which is quite frequently, there's always something new to see.

And really, it's kind of made up of, two primary locations, one just north of State Route two, on the corner of Lassen and Edison, and then one just south of State Route two.

And we are now moving to a great pace on the northern portion and seeing a lot of that kind of come to fruition.

And now we've been kind of moving to that southernmost campus and starting to build there as well.

So for folks in the area, if you haven't seen it, I mean, it is truly just a massive undertaking, but really one that I've never seen from the commercial real estate.

And economic development perspective that I have in my career as well.

Nothing quite like it.

Yeah, speaking in a data center is how big?

Just for example.

I just think like these are bigger than a Walmart and we're talking about maybe having 30 of them out there.

Yeah.

So for this particular build, we'll probably look at about over 200,000ft² as an individual data center.

As as mentioned, we'll have kind of multiple of those across the, the landscape.

And so, again, a number of kind of shows coming up or what we call shells, individual data centers coming up.

But they I think sometimes on those large of properties, it's hard to contextualize just how large they are.

But yeah, just over about 200,000ft² is what we see in speak, maybe a little bit just to, the kind of timing because this is a long, although it's, it's moving remarkably fast.

This is a long build out.

You have a plan for a lot of buildings.

There's a lot of construction workers out there speak to just the maybe some, key timing milestones, for example, that people might, or just general, general idea of like when you'll start using building or those kind of things.

Yeah.

I think when we think of the timing of the overall build, actually, Bill and I were just talking about this yesterday.

You know, we really started to mobilize on the site last spring.

From, from kind of the first launch of that to now being where we are today and seeing development on both sides of those campuses and many hundreds of thousands of square feet kind of under development at this point.

As you drive out there and see some of that, just like I mentioned we did yesterday.

But really, it'll be kind of a phased approach in terms of how we think about wrapping up the construction phase into the operations phase.

But certainly as we kind of build out these facilities, they're not something, I think crypto took a hit on the industry a little bit.

And people understood kind of the the mobile nature of that business.

These are not that these are, you know, permanent structure facilities, lots of deep rooted infrastructure that will sort of support, a lot of this for many years to come.

And so although some of our customers may operate in some of those spaces, these are long term legacy facilities that we will operate for ideally decades to come.

It it's phenomenal to see it there.

Thousands of construction workers.

You have a very talented, construction team, I think, several talented construction teams that are working really hard to build, out there.

There's a probably a few community growing pains.

There's a lot of traffic out there, but long, long term, you're, as you mentioned, you're making some investment in some infrastructure and stuff out there to sort of help, make sure you can handle the, you know, kind of the traffic and everything that goes on out there.

So, yeah, I think along with our capital investment and mounting, $7 million contribution to some of those local roadway improvements, we know that, and that's looking at some intersection improvements at State Route two and, and listen and really excited about, you know, being able to leverage this development as an opportunity to sink some of those dollars in locally and really kind of help, expedite probably what would otherwise be those local, locally driven or state funded projects.

And so we're excited about sinking some dollars into what will be some long term, I think, really wins for that overall area, as we kind of see the impacts in real time at this time.

Right in the switcher way.

So, so even though there's a lot of excitement out there right now about, you know, kind of the construction jobs and all the activities happening out there, the bigger excitement is what happens afterwards as you get ready to occupy these buildings and you start hiring the workforce.

You can't do that overnight.

That talk a little bit about just the, the kind of jobs, the skills, some of the things that AWS is going to do to help, develop the workforce.

They need to staff these facilities.

Yeah.

It's a it's a great point, too, because I think a lot of times people think of cloud computing or anything along these lines, especially of the jobs that are sitting behind the keyboard, programing and things of that nature, which we call cloud computing jobs, phenomenal opportunity, career opportunities as well.

The jobs that we're creating here, we call cloud infrastructure jobs.

And those are really all the things that are still very high tech jobs, but are required to build, connect, operate and maintain.

Is that our fourth pillar?

And that is a vast array of jobs that people can really choose from, and have a lot of skill sets and oftentimes don't require any kind of post-high school degrees or even certificate program.

So a lot of different career paths that we're working on.

We recently held an AI workshop, which is is it internet to the workforce information Information Infrastructure workshop.

And here in South Bend and brought together employers.

So a lot of I think up to 85% of the jobs that we will look to train for and develop locally.

And this is in addition to the thousand jobs that Sam referenced, our jobs that will not be hired directly by AWS, but will be directly as a result of the project to bring that work.

There's a lot of other programs that we've got here internally or that we're bringing to the region, and a lot of those partnerships, like with Ivy tech, are so critical to making sure that we develop the workforce in a manner that suits the communities here and suits the needs of the community here.

You have perhaps some of those.

Jeff, I think you had an opportunity to drop by the fiber optic fusion splicing event that we hosted last year, and I think we brought about 53 students through those two workshops that we hosted locally.

And we recognized that bringing this kind of investment in infrastructure into the space, there isn't always going to be that local talent kind of at the ready for us to hire from.

And so it's really about cultivating those local relationships.

Hillary mentioned Ivy tech, and we have an internal workforce development team that looks to cultivate some of those relationships, to grow that local talent pipeline.

I mean, there's people in our existing regions that do this as a job every day.

But, you know, certainly probably not a lot of folks in northern Indiana or southern Michigan even that have the opportunity to understand what this all means.

And it doesn't mean you have to come with a data center background to do these jobs.

We're really hoping that people come from a wide array and background to kind of take on, again, this calling that is really going to take everyone rallying towards to fulfill what we hope to be, you know, that thousand jobs and beyond.

And I think right now I think we're right, a little above 200 jobs that have already been hired even without operations fully in flux.

So very happy to be down that road.

And in addition, we're very pleased to hear we were having discussions with the, with Saint Joe County about what they're seeing in terms of hotel receipts and restaurants and just the influx of revenues across the entire community, which is so helpful.

To anyone.

Right.

In the in the local levels.

Yeah.

Talk for a second.

Just, maybe the reception.

Yeah.

Like like you said, I had a chance to be at the fusion splicing training, which knocked my socks off a little bit, but I also it gave me this moment of, of, you know, sort of why we do what we do sometimes.

These were folks, that were looking for a better opportunity for them, and their families didn't have a particular skill sets, were excited about what an opportunity ORS might look like.

I wanted to better understand the training that was needed there, and it was kind of it was really exciting because it was all young.

It was white collar, blue collar.

It was really kind of a neat, cross-section.

What's been the reception of the community so far to us on the, on the, you know, kind of filling these open spots.

The workforce side was Hillary mentioned.

We've had the opportunity to hire locally, locally or within the current operations space of the data centers here in Saint Joe County, over 200 people.

And those are, again, those long term operations jobs.

And, I think when we had the opportunity to attend the, information infrastructure workshop or I'm just going to call it Ai2, which is how we internally refer to it, just recently, the amount of local workforce development partners that were in that room.

I mean, it is a true testament to the way that the community has already been planning for some of this great work.

I don't I don't pretend to know what kind of the path of Saint Joe County has been or South Bend has been, but, it's very obvious that many of these partners have come together to understand how they are able to partner with businesses to, again meet the opportunities of, of this economic success.

And walking into that room and seeing over 100 people that play some role in this pipeline development, I think speaks to the local development that you all have been able to cultivate here.

Everything from local educators to different vendors that may hire folks to different nonprofit organizations that help, you know, underserved communities in job placements, to have that backbone in those people already thinking about how companies like ours coming in can benefit from some of those resources, that just adds to the partnership and why it makes sense and where we invest.

Yeah, it really does speak to the overall infrastructure for economic development that the state has as a whole.

The state was also represented yesterday and or recently.

And it was it was really, like Sam said, phenomenal.

To see the partnership across all the lines is pretty neat to think all the the dominoes that have to sort of line up and fall the right place to make a really big, complicated project like this happened.

That boy a lot, a lot of terrific partners at the table.

And when we talk about I'm sorry, Sam, when we talk earlier about what our, selection criteria is, this is an ecosystem that does not exist in many, many places, if not most.

And it is really a prime reason why we were able to select coming into this community.

I'm going to shift to second.

So so we were sort of build the site.

We're going to staff the site.

But but you're also you're making this investment and you want to very much want to be a part of this community.

I think sometimes perception and the big global companies are going to, you know, make their money and move on or whatever.

But, but, but from early on, you, you have sort of, recognize the role that you have as a, as a big employer and want to sort of connect with local nonprofits and other speak to what you're doing in that space.

Yeah.

I mean, just recently we were able to host, Community Fund celebration event, and the company had announced investing $250,000, a quarter of $1 million into these local nonprofits.

And at that celebration event, we awarded 31 nonprofits here locally with those dollars collectively.

And it's really about not only giving them some of those financial resources to continue their great work, but building those partnerships with the with the organizations.

We have local staff, through our operations division that have volunteer hours that they can go out and partner with these.

And so it's about continuing to not only giving them, again, those financial resources to thrive in the work that they do, but cultivating those relationships and those long term partnerships that we really look like from from a from a corporate stewardship perspective.

And I think to your point about kind of large corporation and as we kind of think about how the public better understands this business as well, I always like to give a taste and flavored who our customers are, that we're even able to kind of build this infrastructure in support of.

And this is everything from shopping to social media to health care and really everything in between.

So to say you don't use the cloud or don't understand the cloud, many of the services that you're utilizing on an everyday basis, and this is everything from Amazon.com as previously mentioned.

But Nike Chewy PGA tour, fidelity, Capital One, Johnson and Johnson now.

Yeah.

And that's pretty important.

Exactly.

To get into the public sector, right.

NASA, the US Postal Service, American Red cross, I mean, these are household names that people recognize.

And because of those customers, we have the ability to build the physical infrastructure that supports them.

I love it, and I again, I think there's a ton of excitement as we're getting into our last couple of minutes.

So, so, you know, help us look forward as you as you finish sort of the, you know, the construction, you know, again, I think there's sort of the growing pains right now because there are a lot of construction out there.

Help, help put people at ease about, you know, kind of what a data center is like when it's all done.

Right.

I mean, it's sort of this is a self-contained building that unless we told you was a data center, you not know, give us a fill in our last two minutes for like, what what what they should expect when construction is complete.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people are familiar with Amazon.com and the package delivery system, and the distribution facilities and fulfillment centers that we have associated with that arm to the point we made earlier.

This isn't that.

And so these will be, self-sustaining, but also when not in construction mode, we'll be having our long term operations staff in and out of those facilities, some deliveries and different things, you know, that take to run a business.

But for all intents and purposes, and I think for a long time we just kind of built, put a fence around them, didn't put any signage on them.

And we were kind of the quiet partner in the corner for a realizing that it takes a partnership and really kind of pulling people outside of that campus to understand what that community partnership and how we thrive in those spaces are.

But for all intents and purposes, that are going to be running and offering many of those services that we do from the cloud, we really are limited in terms of their impact on the resources for our community, too.

So unusual for a project, the size and scale.

So that's one of the things that I think benefits us once we're in operations too.

Great.

Obviously, a just a terrific project.

We're thrilled that you chose Indiana.

We thank you for giving us some insight today to better understand it.

We're excited to see construction complete.

Thank you for being with me today.

Thank you, thank you.

Yeah, that's it for our show.

Thank you for watching.

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I'm Jeffrey I'll see you next time.

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