Plus: Amazon says its data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year. And Jeff Bezos launches new AI venture Prometheus while batting down AI job loss fears. Julie Chang hosts.
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[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] Without trusted data, I don't think you have an AI advantage. You may actually be running an
[00:00:04] [SPEAKER_02] high-end liability at machine speed. That's Veeam's Shiva Pillay. Join him at the break to learn why trusted data is the fuel that lets AI scale successfully and safely.
[00:00:16] [SPEAKER_00] Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, June 11. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. Amazon said its global data centers used approximately 2.5 billion gallons of water last year. That's according to a blog post published today that outlined the tech giant's water efficiency efforts. Amazon said despite expanding its data center footprint, water usage at company-operated sites
[00:00:41] [SPEAKER_00] decreased by 2% from 2024. Data center companies have been facing growing scrutiny over the environmental impact of AI. Amazon said its data center's usage of water per kilowatt hour of electricity was more efficient than the industry average in 2025, and that some of its data centers use treated wastewater rather than drinking water. The company said by the end of this decade, it will
[00:01:05] [SPEAKER_00] return more water to communities than its direct operations consume. Meanwhile, Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos said he expects AI to create a labor shortage, rejecting fears that the tech will put humans out of work. The remarks come as Bezos launches a new AI business called Prometheus. Prometheus plans to build an artificial general engineer that can design and manufacture complex physical products
[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_00] such as jet engines. Bezos will co-lead the venture, which is said to be valued at about $41 billion, and has raised $12 billion from investors including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock. And we exclusively report that BlackRock put in an order to buy at least $5 billion worth of SpaceX shares. People familiar with the matter said other large asset managers submitted similar orders,
[00:02:00] [SPEAKER_00] and sources say individual investors alone requested well over $70 billion worth of SpaceX shares, and that the company also received orders from sovereign wealth funds and family offices. To hear more about SpaceX's IPO, tune into tomorrow's tech news briefing podcast.
[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_02] As companies deploy autonomous AI agents, the guardrails and contextual understanding provided by trusted data are critical. Here again is Shiva Pillay, GM and SVP at Veeam.
[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_01] Agentic AI doesn't wait for governance. Agents do not rest. The more bad data you're feeding to your
[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_02] models, the more potential harm. Trusted data is also essential to a company's ability to understand, govern, and precisely recover data at the same velocity and scale that AI can act on it.
[00:02:45] [SPEAKER_01] You need surgical precision for AI and data and data sets, particularly in time as they change. You isolate clean data, validate its integrity, and ensure nothing upstream is compromised. Recovery becomes prioritized by sensitivity tier, not by the size of a workload. So I'm not simply saying go and just recover a whole piece of data. Find me the sensitive data that I need to recover and why.
[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_02] Visit Veeam.com to learn more about how trusted data can power AI at scale.
[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_01] This content was created by custom content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department.