Amazon plans to invest $13 billion in Australia data centers
Amazon is making a substantial commitment to its Australian data center infrastructure during the next four years.
The online giant said it will invest approximately $13 billion between 2025 and 2029 to expand, operate, and maintain its data center infrastructure in Australia. The investment is designed to support customer demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence, accelerating AI adoption and capability, and the continued modernization of Australian organizations.
The Amazon Web Services hosted cloud computing division of Amazon began operating in Australia in 2012 with the opening of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.
In 2023, AWS launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region and the country’s first AWS Local Zones in Perth. In April 2024, AWS launched its Amazon Bedrock fully managed generative AI service, in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.
AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
AWS customers can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve greater fault tolerance. The company says that Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
Amazon has also committed billions of dollars to data infrastructure development projects across the globe, most recently in Taiwan. AWS has plans for 13 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Chile, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
[READ MORE: Amazon Web Services to invest $5 billion in Taiwan data centers]
Amazon invests in Australian renewable energy
To support the expanded local cloud infrastructure, Amazon is investing in three new solar farms in Victoria and Queensland. European Energy will deliver and operate the new projects, with Amazon committing to purchase a combined capacity of more than 170-megawatts (MW) across the three solar farms.
Amazon already invests in eight solar and wind projects across New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, which are helping provide energy to Amazon’s Australian operations, including Amazon data centers and fulfillment centers.
Once all 11 renewable energy projects are operational, they are estimated to generate more than 1.4 million megawatt hours of carbon-free energy annually, or enough to power about 290,000 Australian homes each year.
"This planned investment deepens our long-term commitment to supporting the growth and development of Australian organizations of all sizes and helping them harness the enormous opportunity that generative AI offers," said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS. "We’re proud to be expanding our world-class data center infrastructure, bringing more renewable energy projects online, and supporting the country’s vision to be a global AI leader."
Since 2017, AWS says it has trained more than 400,000 people in AI across Australia.
