Amazon to invest extra 10 billion euros in Germany

Amazon said Wednesday it will invest an additional 10 billion euros (10.7 billion dollars) in Germany, most of it
in cloud computing, the US tech giant’s latest major investment in Europe.
A total of 8.8 billion euros will come from Amazon’s cloud computing
division AWS and will be invested in southwest Germany by 2026, with the rest
going into logistics, robotics and company offices.

The investment comes on top of 7.8 billion euros announced last month by
AWS towards building a “sovereign cloud” centre in Germany.
The first sovereign cloud complex will be set up in the state of
Brandenburg, and will be operational by the end of 2025.

The new system is to address concerns of some European countries and public
agencies, which have been reluctant to resort to cloud computing for fear data
would be transferred to other jurisdictions, notably the United States.
With its recently announced investments, Amazon said it was hiring
thousands of new workers in Germany, taking its total number of permanent
employees in the country to about 40,000 by the end of the year.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on X that the investments showed that Germany
remained “an attractive business location”.
“As the government, we are working on precisely this: strengthening our
competitiveness,” he said.

Germany, Europe’s top economy, sees attracting new investments in high-tech
fields as crucial as it struggles to emerge from a period of weakness.
The tech giant has also in recent times announced major investments to
expand data centres in Spain and to develop cloud infrastructure and
logistical infrastructure of its parcel delivery system in France.

A pioneer of e-commerce, Amazon’s AWS also dominates cloud computing with
31 percent of the market at the end of 2023, according to Stocklytics.
But rivals Microsoft and Google are gaining ground.(AFP)