Amazon will invest A$20 billion ($13 billion) in the five years through 2029 to build data centers in Australia amid growing demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications.
The spending—the biggest investment from a global technology provider in Australia—will hasten AI adoption across the country, boost productivity and modernize the IT infrastructure for Australian entities, Amazon said in a statement over the weekend.
“The investment will generate economic opportunity for Australians, including skilled jobs and infrastructure that can support complex AI and supercomputing applications,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in the statement. Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources estimates AI and automation will contribute up to A$600 billion annually to the nation’s GDP by 2030.
“AI is a once-in-a-generation transformation, and Amazon is pleased to be empowering all Australians to innovate at scale through this investment,” Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, said in the statement.
To support the enlarged cloud infrastructure’s power needs, Amazon is investing in three new solar farms in Victoria and Queensland to provide more than 170-megawatts of electricity to the data centers. When completed, Amazon will have 11 solar farms across Australia with a combined capacity of 1.4 million megawatt hours, enough to power about 290,000 Australian homes each year, Amazon said.
Amazon first invested in Australia in 2012 with the opening of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region hub. Since then it has built several new facilities in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. The e-commerce giant has also trained more than 400,000 people in the country, equipping them with digital skills to support generative AI programs.
