Amazon Web Services bets big on Australian data centres with $20 billion investment

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it will invest A$20 billion to expand data centre infrastructure in Australia over the next five years.

Prime minister Anthony Albanese, on his way to the G7 Summit in Canada, met with AWS CEO Matt Garman in Seattle over the weekend for the announcement.

The infrastructure rollout by 2029 will see the development and expansion of data centres in Melbourne and Sydney that include storage, networking, analytics, and other services, supporting cloud and AI demand.

Three new solar farms in Victoria and Queensland will support the infrastructure expansion as part of the company’s commitment to net zero by 2040. All up Amazon will be supplied from 11 renewable energy projects generating more than 1.4 million megawatt hours energy annually and make the business the third largest purchaser of renewable energy in Australia.

Prime minister Albanese said AWS is a trusted US technology provider and this is the largest global technology investment announcement in Australia’s history.

“This significant investment will offer Australian industries the ability to take advantage of the revolutionary opportunities provided by artificial intelligence,” he said.

“It will build on Australia’s growing data centre infrastructure and contribute to our economic growth and resilience, including by providing more skilled jobs and AI-ready infrastructure.”

The announcement comes just days after local data centre provider NextDC announced a $2 billion plan for new infrastructure in Melbourne, with support from the Victorian government.

Matt Garman said the planned investment will help Australian organisations harness the enormous opportunity that generative AI offers.

“We’re proud to be expanding our world-class data centre infrastructure, bringing more renewable energy projects online, and supporting the country’s vision to be a global AI leader. AI is a once-in-a-generation transformation, and Amazon is pleased to be empowering all Australians to innovate at scale through this investment,” he said.

“Customers like Atlassian and Canva were startups when they started building with AWS, and we’ve allowed them to scale their ambitions globally, exporting their interesting technologies and businesses all around the world to become some of the largest technology companies globally.

“We hope that our $20 billion investment will help these next set of Australian entrepreneurs and startups become the next Atlassian and Canva all around the world.”

The $20 billion infrastructure plan follows the launch of AWS AI Spring Australia, programs designed to accelerate AI adoption and capability. They include the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, a program designed to grow early-stage generative AI startups, and AWS AI Launchpad.

“Since 2017 we’ve trained over 400,000 people in Australia to upskill and learn new technologies, and we’re just getting started. Through our AI-Ready Institute, we’ve committed to equipping more Australians with the skills that they need to drive tomorrow’s economy,” Garman said.

They include AWS’s Work-Based Learning Program, a 12-month training program for data centre operations, and Amazon’s AI Ready initiative, which is providing free AI skills training to two million people globally by 2025.

“The demand that we’re seeing for cloud computing and AI is massive, and it’s remaking every single industry out there in the world, from banking to healthcare to retail, the climate wall, everything,” Garman said.

“And we estimate that technology over the next decade will drive over $600 billion increases in Australia’s GDP out of the year 2030.”