Amazon to invest extra 10 bn euros in Germany

Amazon said Wednesday it will invest an additional 10 billion euros ($10.7 billion) 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” center 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 centers 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.

© 2024 AFP