How Amazon Continues to Power Up its Data Centre Presence
As AI interest surges alongside global energy use, tech giant Amazon is betting on a broad range of investments to drive its data centre business forward.
Most recently, the company has invested US$1.3bn into its data centre business in Italy. The company’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is planning to invest this amount over the next five years to grow its regional data centre operations.
This is part of the company’s efforts to further expand across the continent and follows a May 2024 investment in Spain and continued investments in Germany through until 2040. Earlier in 2024, AWS invested US$2.2bn into Italian data centre expansion by 2029, as it continues to grow its presence across Europe and Asia.
Bolstering European investment
Aiming to remain a leader in enterprise data centre development, Amazon’s plan to boost its European investments is partly designed to boost its cloud offerings in Europe.
AWS launched its first cloud region in Italy in 2020 with the prospect to invest €2 billion (US$2.12bn) by 2029. According to the company via a statement seen by Reuters, the latest investment into the country could support up to 5,500 jobs through to 2029 across the AWS data centre supply chain.
These jobs could range from construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications and jobs within the broader local economy.
Such investments have come at a pivotal time for businesses across Europe, as there is concern that the continent is not presently working fast enough to support a sustainable transition for its data centre industry.
Recent research posits that European data centre demand is expected to more than triple by 2030, highlighting significant concerns that data centre infrastructure will need more sustainability funding in order to keep up with technology demand.
Amazon has already invested billions of dollars into German data centres, which includes renewable energy projects. Likewise, its European energy projects have enabled more than 180 wind and solar projects across 13 countries, according to the company. Once operational, they are expected to provide 6.7 gigawatts (GW) of energy capacity to power more than 5.7 million households each year in Germany.
The company also has a net zero pledge across its operations by 2040 and, as part of The Climate Pledge, to match all its global electricity use with 100% renewable energy by 2025 - five years ahead of its 2030 target.
A foray into alternative renewables
To further advance its data centre progress worldwide, Amazon is also developing Small Modular Reactor (SMR) projects to invest in nuclear power.
The organisation entered into nuclear energy agreements with Energy Northwest and Dominion Energy, in addition to nuclear reactor X-energy, to make these investments. These agreements are designed to help support Amazon’s data centre facilities and the local communities around them, in addition to combating rising emissions.
Whilst there is some controversy around nuclear energy use, Amazon - like its fellow tech giants currently - are eager to act quickly to source low-carbon power to avoid jeopardising their climate agreements.
The renewable has been cited as a ‘quick fix’ solution for big tech organisations to continue investing in generative AI (Gen AI), whilst avoiding a large spike in emissions.
Speaking on this collaboration at the time, AWS CEO Matt Garman commented: “Nuclear is a safe source of carbon-free energy that can help power our operations and meet the growing demands of our customers, while helping us progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040.”
These new agreements from Amazon have taken place amid growing trends among tech giants to address increasing energy demands. Disruptive technologies like AI and cloud computing demand huge amounts of power to run, which puts an inevitable strain on a data centre’s carbon emissions.
Elsewhere, US energy regulators rejected an interconnection agreement for an Amazon data centre to connect directly to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission explained the agreement could raise power bills for the public and impact the reliability of the local grid.
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