AWS Summit Washington, DC 2025 | Roger E. Wehner, AWS

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Roger E. Wehner

Vice President Economic Development

AWS

Inside the AI shift in government: 11 perspectives on public sector ops transformation

Public sector transformation is entering a critical phase, driven by the rise of agentic AI and digital labor that doesn’t just automate, it adapts. But the biggest obstacle isn’t the technology. It’s the systems, silos and culture built for a slower, pre-AI world.TheCUBE’s John Furrier discusses public sector transformation.What’s really holding back progress in the public sector isn’t a lack of innovation — it’s the difficulty of adoption. From aging infrastructure to deeply rooted bureaucracies, systemic inertia remains the biggest obstacle. Meanwhile, AI is rapidly reshaping the role of government, raising the stakes for timely transformation, according to theCUBE’s John Furrier

play_circle_outline AWS DC Summit coverage with focus on economic development and community partnerships

play_circle_outline Emphasis on building partnerships and embedding in communities for long-term success

play_circle_outline Apprenticeship program for skilled technical workforce in data centers

play_circle_outline Impact of data center expansions on job creation and community revitalization

play_circle_outline Economic impact studies and job growth in local communities

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Roger E. Wehner, AWS

Roger E. Wehner

Vice President Economic Development AWS

Roger Wehner, vice president of economic development at Amazon Web Services Inc., joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Scott Hebner during the AWS Summit Washington, DC event to discuss AWS’s role in driving regional growth through strategic investment and community collaboration. The conversation explores how AWS approaches economic development with a long-term mindset that goes beyond infrastructure.

Wehner shares how AWS is investing billions in areas like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, while prioritizing adaptive partnerships that support education... Read more

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What is the strategic mission and focus of the team in relation to supporting AWS's expansion aspirations and building capacities to serve customers? add

What strategies is the company implementing to embed themselves in the community and move away from a transactional real estate engineering mindset? add

What opportunities are provided to students in the four-week course mentioned, and how does it help them explore various skilled technical workforce jobs related to constructing and maintaining a facility? add

What methods are used to analyze the downstream job effects of a project, including indirect and induced impacts on the community? add

What potential benefits can be seen in working with communities around development projects such as hotels and bars? add

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Roger E. Wehner, AWS

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage here at the AWS DC Summit. We're on the show floor. My name is John Furrier. I'm the host of theCUBE. My co-host, Scott Hebner, research analyst at theCUBE Research, bringing all the action, and we did our analysis. A lot of game-changing action here. Generative AI, big data center build outs, big CapEx, big announcements, the impact between technology, money and society happening here. Roger Wehner is here, Vice President of AWS Economic Development. He's got a front row seat to the innovation. Roger, thank you for being on theCUBE and taking your time.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah, John, Scott, thank you for the opportunity. This is exciting. We love talking about what we do.

>> A lot of action going on in terms of the deployments of the data centers, the $20 billion in Pennsylvania, 10 billion in North Carolina, and here to show. It's the public sector meets commercial all in one. You got huge announcement, a lot of policy, but also innovation is happening, but you're involved in the whole big game of the CapEx, billions of dollars being thrown around. Economic though. What do you do? What is your job? I mean, do you simply, "Okay, I'm going to calculate discounted cash flow on society."? What do you do?

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah, great question. So look, first and foremost, we have a tactical mission and our mission... You had Prasad before. Our tactical mission is to support AWS's expansion aspirations and the efforts there to build capacities so we can serve our customers. And our demand is robust right now. So as you can see by the announcements, there's no shortage of activity and our job is to help... And so our strategic job, and the thing, candidly, that I get most excited about as a previous economic developer is we love going in and building these types of partnerships with community. We make a promise on how we're going to positively contribute to those communities. And each community is different. Their needs are different. Their wants are different. So I've got a team of economic developers that they're either pure economic developers, they come from AWS infrastructure or they come from utilities. There's, like you said, an obvious synergy there, and we figure out what that right partnership with that community looks like.

>> I was all kidding and all, but I asked Prasad this because the data center business used to be a facilities real estate transaction, now it's a systems design. There's a lot of systems thinking involved. You're on the economic side. So how do you bridge those two worlds? Because, not to oversimplify it, but it's like I can see I'm going to build a new community, a big golf course, gated community in Florida, get the construction. It's a lot of moving parts, a lot of economic values. How do you thread that economic view? Because it's technology, it's compute, it's power. There's a lot of variables. It's not like building a track home somewhere or a new residential shopping center, or something like that. I mean, complicated. How do you bring that together?

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah, John, I think the first thing that we had to do is kind of get out of that old transactional real estate mindset, and candidly, the engineering mindset. You got to remember, we're making a multi-billion dollar investment in the community. We're married and we're going to be married for a long period of time, and with any marriage, there are ups and downs, and you're seeing those. And so our job, and I think the thought process of the company has shifted in that regard. One of the biggest credits I'll give the businesses is when they asked me to build this capability for the business, I said, "Well, I want to staff it with local economic developers because they sat on the other side of the table, they've built these types of partnerships. They're going to be the best people to represent the company and get us out of that kind of transactional real estate engineering mindset." And so now we think about things like how do we embed ourselves in the community? How do we build sites, which you've seen us go to much larger sites where we can make a more campus-like appeal, fit in. Our data centers look different now than they used to. So we're trying to find ways to embed ourselves in the community on every level, K-12 education, workforce development, tax revenues, aesthetics, all of those different things, trying to create a better fit and partnership in the community. Not that it's ever bad, but it can always be better, right?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, and that's negotiating and having conversations with the local economic development teams. And so peel that onion back a little bit more, some of the conversations that you get into.

Roger E. Wehner

>> So when we go in, yes, is it still about to some degree bricks and mortar, water infrastructure, storm water infrastructure power? Absolutely. But wrapped around all of that is, okay, we're going to return X fiscal value in terms of tax receipts, expenditures, GDP impact, all of those things.

Scott Hebner

>> Jobs.

Roger E. Wehner

>> That's right, jobs. And the big question is what are their needs? Every community is different. The needs that I see in Eastern Oregon are very different than needs in Northern Virginia, and so understanding those community needs, making sure what we put together with them from a return perspective, those top... I always go in, "Tell me the top five things that are vexing your community right now." And we should be that first responder, be that upgraded technology. We went into some communities and they have volunteer fire departments. Those volunteer fire departments don't have a cutting-edge defibrillators. That community deserves it. They want it, but since they're volunteer, the way funds are distributed doesn't always work right. So we can go in and say, "Okay, top five thing in that community is super easy to be a part of. Let's go do that."

>> I really think what you're doing is so impressive because I don't think people understand that this is a technology enablement inherently built into the areas you're building that you bring to the table, just benefit there. Then there's this revitalization effect. It's not necessarily on a spreadsheet, but there's a cultural thing. Schools will probably be smarter because you've got Amazonians around and Amazonian families. Technology's in your backyard. People are talking about probably GPUs and chip memory cache. Yeah. I mean, this is what goes on. Not to get all nerdy, but it's a revitalization around it. So how are you fostering that? Do you capture that value? Do they capture that value? Because you're creating value with the footprint, there's some trade there, you negotiate that, but there's real economic downstream value. How do you guys view that? Because we see a side effect with culturally change. They're tech-savvy by default, if you're going to have a region in your yard, backyard.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah, it's a great point. So when we did the announcement, if you saw, for North Carolina, the governor named off five different ways that AWS had partnered with this administration in the state over the years, particularly during the pandemic to solve cutting-edge problems that the pandemic brought them. So to your point, we're creating these changes there. We've seen the same thing in Mississippi now. So there's always those situations where just a sheer function of our technology and innovation creates real change for constituencies and governments, but even at the localized level. So the thing we get super passionate about is we have two programs where we go into the K-12 system and we have STEM education. You may find this interesting, we certainly do. If you look at STEM education across the United States, you had a lot in the elementary school system and you had a lot in the high school system, but oddly enough, middle schools were forgotten. It's the craziest thing.

>> Yeah, that's where they drop out.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Well, you just hit on a core issue for me. So we know the data tells us that we use young boys particularly, they drop out in high school, particularly in their sophomore year, but where you really lost them was in middle school because they didn't see a pathway from what they love to do every day, working with their hands, they didn't see a pathway to that future. So being able to bring these tech jobs, what we call skilled technical workforce. So the example I always use, I can go to any elementary school, middle school in the country. I can say, "Do you kids know what a plumber is?" They're going to go, "Yeah, I know what a plumber." May not want to be one, but they know what it is. If I tell them, "Hey, do you want to be a fusion slicer? Do you want to be a data center technician?"

>> Co-packaged optics.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah, right. They go, "Yeah, that sounds super interesting to me, but I have no idea what that means." So what we found through these programs, particularly in the middle school, we're creating career awareness. There was a young man, I won't say his name, in Mississippi. I watched the class. The kid was bouncing off the wall. He was so hyperactive and he was just really struggling to kind of be in the classroom. But when the curriculum in our We Build It Better boxes came open, and the hands-on tactile exercises of STEM education came up, the kid locked in.

>> He's a builder.

Roger E. Wehner

>> He is a builder. The kid was in his element.

>> Roger has a great point. My son's was in choir, but he was forced to take the classes. His sister did it. He opted in, but he didn't really understand what choir was. So we had a great teacher and he went on to have a great career in high school because he learned and he didn't know he was the learning mode, and you can look at the success of middle school teachers and what the programs are. So I think that's a spot-on point. If they can feel the success and get the confidence, they can get that going. If they have talent, even better. But a lot of it is kind of lost. And so that's why I'm kind of focused on this kind of opaque discussion because I think what you're really doing is fertilizing and putting seeds down in the community that aren't on the spreadsheet. You know what I'm saying? It's almost like a-

Scott Hebner

>> It's an intangible.

>> It's an intangible that does grow if we know what we know happens, people get smarter, they're curious or they get exposed to tech in a world that will be dominated by technology. What's the downside

Scott Hebner

>> They get addicted to GenAI, and I see with my three boys. You just got to get them exposed to it, and then they got some teaching on how to use it and what you can do with it. I always joke, my kids know so much because they grew up with the internet. We had the Encyclopedia Britannica, so they don't understand, "I don't know every capital in the world." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? I don't even know the United States." And you can see what that did for them, and now you have AI. But it's getting these kids to-

>> They're coding in high school. I mean, elementary school.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah.

Roger E. Wehner

>> So I'll give you a poor example. So we had a kid and it was kind of like what we've just described, went through our Blue Mountain Community College program in Eastern Oregon. He was one of our first graduates of that program in the two-year college system. I think he had done a forklift operator in a warehouse, he'd done ag because that was common in that area, and now the guy runs our data center region in Eastern Oregon. But to your point, he got in, he saw a pathway, he got hooked on tech, even if it's skilled technical workforce side, and now he's in management leadership and uses all those tools that used to run through his servers to run the business. It's just giving them a way, a vision of where they can go.

>> Well, that's a great example. In the keynote, you guys had a big announcement around what you guys are working on. There's actually now programmatic, scaling that up. You guys have taken that and scale it up. Explain what you guys have announced here, what's going on here, because in the keynote, that apprenticeship program... What's it called?

Roger E. Wehner

>> The GPA?

>> Yeah, explain what that is because it's a real kind of template, I believe, and that's an exciting program.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah, so really it's a four-week course. We pay basically their salary while they go through the course and they get exposed to all the different bits, those skilled technical workforce jobs that it takes to construct, connect, power, operate, and maintain that facility. So data center technician, data center operations, cabling, all of those things, HVAC. And it's like a crash course. Now, each one of those kids brings a certain predilection to that opportunity and they may say, "Oh, I don't want to be a data center technician because I don't have the patience to do that," but the idea of being an HV electrician may really excite them. So this program gives them an opportunity to say-

>> How long? Four weeks?

Roger E. Wehner

>> Four weeks. It's four weeks. We pay for it. And they basically get to sample every job in a data center.

Scott Hebner

>> Introduction, see where you bite.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Exactly. What do you gravitate towards? What engages you? What are you stoked about? Like I said, we've only lost one kid in that program, one learner in that program so far, and as we scale that up, each one of those folks so far has either gotten a job with AWS like you saw today, every one of them did, or all the others that took jobs, got them with our vendors and suppliers, which account for a big part of our ecosystem.

Scott Hebner

>> And the one you lost wasn't even due to... It was personal, right?

>> How does that work? So is it only in areas you're expanding or just a global program?

Roger E. Wehner

>> Right now we deploy it in the regions where we have infrastructure. We're starting there first, but then we scale out. So in Ohio, we started right in with the Tolles Technology Center in Columbus, and now we're more branching out in the community center and in almost every state what we're doing is getting these programs certified so that they can be taught at any community college or tech school in the state. Most states have that capability and that makes it infinitely scalable.

>> So Northern Virginia was the community college you ran this before program in, you turned that cohort around. I mean, just a great access to basically get a degree in AWS. I mean, that's what they're doing.

Roger E. Wehner

>> That's right. And the last one was at Germanna Community College, which got us down into the new places. We're expanding down South a little bit. And then years ago we did what we call a fusion splicing course out in Danville, Virginia, and I know now three individuals who went through that cohort of 20 have relocated from Danville, are now in Northern Virginia. One of those students that got a job offer on-site in Danville went for , a company out of Columbus, Ohio from our CMH region, and he is now the on-site manager in Indiana running all of team officials work in South Bend, Indiana.

>> We always use a sports metaphor, we call tech athletes. You basically running a combine workout. Run the 40, go long-

Scott Hebner

>> And that's what's going to follow in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and those investments, and that connects back to the conversation we had with Sarah earlier today.

>> All right, so what's the coolest thing you're working on right now?

Roger E. Wehner

>> Well, obviously the expansions are fun. It's fun to dig in deep with states, go through all the numbers, figure out how we can partner and make sense for them and make sense for us, and the bigger they are, the more complex they are. Particularly storm water. Our goal is to use nothing but recycled water, and when we go into communities, they're always concerned. They always go, "Water, water." So we'll say, "What's your current program for recycled water?" And they're like, "Well, we don't have one. Some places," because they haven't had the need or they haven't had the outputters, that we can take their water. Building those types of solutions with communities are super exciting. Then when we invest in those and pay for them, that not only serves us... Our goal is to never burden the municipal water system from a waste water or candidly from a potable water perspective. It doesn't work every time, but every time we run those out to figure out whether we can put our money where our mouth is and help co-invest in those things.

>> Well, you guys are already hitting most of your sustainability goals anyway, and what Prasad told me was that a lot of the data centers are air-cooled.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Some of them. Depending on... Dew point's a real thing and it changes the way we-

>> The new ones are maybe. No, but I mean, these are resource decisions. You live in a resource-constrained world, energy-bounded, so your economic viewpoint is through that prism, and then getting married to the community.

Roger E. Wehner

>> And they're all trade-offs, and so how do we build the right technology solution for that community and available resources. But investing in those and helping them do things they've never done before. We've gone to some communities that had great economic developers, but they've never really had the opportunity to work like a megaproject and then deliver it. A lot of people get to work megaprojects, but they may not win, so they never deliver.

>> And you have to build in an end-to-end workflow where it's ongoing after the fact. You're not deploying and saying, "See you later." You got to continue to build and put the seeds down and create that value that you know will deliver and also hit their immediate concerns in the community.

Scott Hebner

>> What's the downstream job effects? So not just the Amazon AWS employees, but I would imagine it sparks a whole...

Roger E. Wehner

>> It does. It does. So I've got a whole team of economists that sit around and they do these economic impact studies. Far smarter than me, and they figure out the direct, indirect and induced impact, they figure out GDP impacts and they can model with a pretty highly rigorous model what all these impacts can be. So we do that before we go in and then we analyze it kind of in the as-built world, and then... We know how many jobs we've created for us, so we have a pretty good idea how much jobs we've created in our vendor pool, but when you look at those indirect and induced impacts, how many new waitresses in the community?

Scott Hebner

>> How many new restaurants?

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah, how many new bartenders? How many new hotels? So we work with the community... I'll give you a poor example, right now, if you go to the communities around our builds in Mississippi, it's super hard to get a hotel room. That's a great problem to have, and so we're working with them to track literally the tax revenues they get off bed taxes because we're inducing and then the sales tax associated with food and beverage. These are all ways-

>> I think the upside potential too with entrepreneurship, that's where it kicks in on the back end as these young and the communities get more savvy and have access to basically a super computer in their backyard, because remember the latency hop between town and... It's probably nice.

Roger E. Wehner

>> We see both ends of that spectrum. So even the food trucks that come to our sites to service, three, 4,000 workers, we've seen several that have turned into full-fledged restaurants, bricks and mortar, and those... But then to your point on the other end, when we partner with the coding academies and places, et cetera, I haven't seen one of those code academies yet that doesn't have folks that already have a degree in something else. I met a gentleman the other day, so he has a music degree and he has been learning AI and different technologies to enhance his marketability and he started a company where he is helping artists protect the revenue stream associated with their art form.

>> Yeah, he's contributing. And we had Shannon Kellogg on earlier, the whole digital divide. You guys are, again, a template for future opportunities to bring connect... First of all, they're going to have good internet in that area. You got a data center, it's even a fat pipe as they say. The plumbing will be good. So this is a cool vibe. So do you guys get, not nervous, but wish you could articulate that on the spreadsheet better in terms of the future value? I was kidding about discounted cash flows, but that's a different MPV, but there's an unlimited potential.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. So I think our leadership gets it. So we're not under a lot of pressure to make it look good and pretty-

>> Not for internal, but for the external.

Roger E. Wehner

>> But I was going to go to your point. Yes. I wish we could explain the full-fledged benefit every day of the 100 things we're trying to do to make communities better, because a lot of them are hard to quantify, a lot of them are hard to... Things we're doing today, how do we quantify what that music guy-

>> It's all outcome-based. So for example, the cohorts turn into an incubator. Incubator turns into some venture capital comes in.

Scott Hebner

>> The economic growth, the multiplier effect of the jobs, of the money. I mean, it's just-

>> Well, a whole new world. Roger, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspective. This is a whole 'nother level of infrastructure being laid down. I mean, Amazon went from two regions, now they got a bunch of regions. Do the confidence. Now you're getting the state level. A grid of distributed connections is coming. I can almost see it in my mind's eye, Amazon regions everywhere in the US. You have no comment.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Well, our leadership always has said determine the fullness of time. We will continue to expand.

>> AI will drive an ever-needing... That's an Andy Jassyism. I hear that all the time.

Roger E. Wehner

>> That is a Jassyism for sure. I think the thing that we always focus on is no one's putting their phones down, no one's putting their tablets down, and I always encourage, try to imagine a world without all the things we've become super accustomed to. I couldn't be home the other night, I was going to be late. I needed to make my mother dinner. I'm not there to do it. So I ordered out by an app and had food delivered to my mother so she could eat dinner because she's at home alone. Imagine a world where you couldn't do that.

>> Yeah, we live in a whole new world. It's going to get faster, the pace of play's high. We really appreciate what you do. We me need more horsepower, we need more supercomputing, and I know you guys are doing their job. Thanks for coming up.

Roger E. Wehner

>> Thank you so much for your time.

>> All right, we're here. A lot of build out, a lot of opportunities ahead of us. The headroom as this next wave hits public sector and the commercial side, of course builders and entrepreneurship is booming as well as AI comes in being powered by Amazon. It's theCUBE doing our part, sharing that with you. Thanks for watching.