Matt and Georgia recap AWS re:Invent 2025 with special guest Michael Walmsley, AWS Serverless Hero and Global Technology Architect at Accenture. Fresh from the Vegas event with 70,000 attendees, they discuss the major announcements, the shift toward AI agents, and Michael's wild experience coding on a bus for a $100K hackathon prize.

Road to re:Invent Hackathon

• 50 developers coded on buses traveling LA to Vegas over 5 hours
• Michael's team built "Lucky Loo.me" - an AI bathroom finder using facial recognition
• Winning team created "Oric" - an IDE that turns 3 lines into 3,000 lines of AI slop
• Prize: $100K split among the winning team

The Big Theme: AI Agents Everywhere

• "Agents" was the dominant word at every booth
• AWS pushing agent capabilities into every service team
• Evolution from general AI (2024) to production agent platforms (2025)

Announcements we covered:

Agent Core Updates

• New policy controls for blocking unauthorized actions
• Evaluation tools for inspecting agent behavior
• Progressive adoption - use pieces without adopting the whole platform

AWS Agent Marketplace

• Vendors can now sell pre-built agents
• Example: Cloud Zero cost management agent

Lambda Updates

• Lambda managed instances
• Durable functions for long-running workflows in code
• Alternative for developers who don't want Step Functions

S3 Vectors (GA)

• Store 20 trillion vectors in one bucket
• 90% cost savings vs traditional vector databases
• Sub-100ms query times for frequent queries
• "S3 is the cheapest database on the planet"

CloudWatch Unified Data Store

• All logs and metrics exposed in S3 Tables
• Cheap, structured SQL querying of observability data

AWS Interconnect ⭐ Biggest Surprise

• High-speed encrypted links between AWS and Google Cloud
• Azure support coming 2026
• Free during preview (pricing TBA)
• Major shift from AWS's anti-multi-cloud stance
• Acknowledges multi-cloud reality in enterprises

Kiro

• Rebranding away from confusing "Amazon Q" umbrella
• Kiro Powers: AI-activated tool modules
• Reduces context bloat in coding agents
• Active hackathon scene with significant prize pools

Michael Walmsley - AWS Serverless Hero, Global Technology Architect at Accenture, specializing in serverless and SaaS architecture. Fourth year attending re:Invent.

AWS is maturing from general AI capabilities to production-ready agent platforms while finally embracing multi-cloud architectures. The focus has shifted to making agents secure, manageable, and practical for enterprise use.

In this episode, Matt and Georgia sit down with Brad Young (Capgemini Invent) and Alistair Adams (Solution Energy) for a fast-moving conversation about AI’s exploding energy appetite and what it means for the future of data centers, power grids, and sustainability. From geopolitical tension to geothermal innovation, this one covers the full energy spectrum.

What We Covered:

- AI’s Energy Crunch AI growth is driving unprecedented demand for power. Hyperscalers like Meta, Google, and Microsoft are signing multi-billion-dollar infrastructure contracts at record pace, stretching grids and reshaping global infrastructure priorities. - The Rise of “Power-First” Google’s “power-first strategy” shows the new reality: build data centers where the power is, not where the people are. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang agrees—co-locating at generation sites may be the future. Reliable, renewable baseload power is now the real competitive edge. - Water: The Silent Crisis Energy gets the headlines, but water is just as critical. Google already uses ~70 billion litres annually for cooling—on track to rise tenfold. Innovations like geothermal heat rejection (e.g., the Pawsey supercomputer in WA) offer promising alternatives. - Renewables: What Actually Works Not all green energy is created equal. Wind and solar can’t deliver the 24/7 baseload those massive GPU clusters require. That leaves geothermal and nuclear as the only scalable clean options—though nuclear remains politically fraught in markets like Australia.

Regional Realities

- Australia: Victoria faces a looming 1.5 GW gap with coal retirement. - UK: Grid constraints limit data center growth. - US: Federal policy is leaning hard into nuclear and geothermal for AI. - Europe: Regulation is reshaping the tech landscape—for better or worse.

Cloud’s Hidden ESG Problem

Most cloud usage sits in companies’ Scope 3 emissions. As ESG rules tighten, lack of transparency from hyperscalers becomes a real compliance exposure. - Social License Becomes Strategy Community pushback is halting billion-dollar projects. The new game: secure energy, protect water, and bring the community with you. “Permission-based infrastructure” is quickly becoming the norm. - AI, Talent & the Enterprise Gap We discuss the widening skills challenge—junior staff struggle to validate AI outputs, and enterprises claiming “we don’t have use cases” are already falling behind. - Greener Compute Through Smart Pricing Dynamic cloud pricing tied to renewable availability is on the horizon—think “off-peak compute,” automatically routing workloads to greener grids.

Standout Insights

- We’re in the “Nokia 3210 era” of AI—25+ years of disruption ahead. - Robotics is still more marketing than reality. - Enterprise AI adoption is early; the real environmental impact is still to come.

Key Takeaways

- Data center location will follow energy, not geography. - Community permission is as critical as capital. - Water use must be part of every sustainability conversation. - Geothermal and nuclear are the only viable clean baseload options. - The next decade will be messy as demand outpaces grid upgrades. - Hyperscalers are accelerating renewable markets—out of necessity. - ESG exposure from opaque cloud emissions is rising fast.

Conclusion

AI’s growth is forcing a complete rethink of how we power digital infrastructure. The winners will be those who can solve the combined puzzle of clean energy, water management, community trust, and transparent reporting—at a speed the grid has never been asked to move before.