A lead article in The Wall Street Journal on June 30, 2024 highlighted Amazon’s continuing investments into data centers, both across the US and around the globe. According to the Journal:
Amazon is planning to spend more than $100 billion over the next decade on data centers, an impressive level of investment even for a company known for its spending ways. The Seattle company is now devoting more investment money to its cloud computing and AI infrastructure than to its sprawling network of e-commerce warehouses.
Amazon Web Services, the arm that manages Amazon’s cloud business, has opened data centers for years, but executives said there is a surge in investment now to meet demand triggered by the excitement around AI.
“We have to dive in. We have to figure it out,” said John Felton, who took over as AWS’s chief financial officer this year after spending most of his career in Amazon’s retail fulfillment operations.
With high demand for AI infrastructure, Amazon and other tech companies have struggled to get the parts, property and power that data centers with supercomputers require.
“We’re just keeping our heads down and focusing on delivering that capacity right now,” said Kevin Miller, AWS vice president of global data centers.
The full Wall Street Journal article can be found here (subscription required).