AMAZON.COM said it would invest 15.7 billion euros (S$23 billion) in Spain to expand its cloud business in Europe, the biggest outlay Amazon has announced so far on the continent, adding to a string of investment commitments around the world in recent weeks from the company and its rivals in the cloud.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on Wednesday (May 22) that it will make the investment to 2033, and that the plan is an upgrade to a 2021 commitment to spend 2.5 billion euros in the country.
Amazon has laid out tens of billions of US dollars for expanding AWS globally, announcing similar long-term projects in Germany, Mexico, the US, Saudi Arabia and Singapore this year. AWS, the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services and data storage via massive server farms, is facing increasing competition from rivals such as Microsoft, which is mounting its own global expansion.
In addition to providing cloud services to corporate customers, Amazon’s data centres are a key piece of infrastructure to enable the next generation of artificial intelligence tools that require more computing power and longer training times.
Amazon also said it would invest 7.8 billion euros in German data centres to 2040 and French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said Amazon committed to spending 1.2 billion euros on infrastructure and computing earlier this month. BLOOMBERG
