Amazon to Invest $3 Billion to Open Data Centres in Spain in 2022

Amazon plans to invest EUR 2.5 billion (roughly Rs. 22,175 crores) in new data centres in the Spanish northern region of Aragon that will open in mid 2022, the company said on one of its websites on Monday.

The cloud computing service unit of Amazon, Amazon Web Services, will invest the amount over a period of ten years, the company said.

The investment includes capital expenditure, the construction of the centres, imports of equipment, and operating expenses such as the salaries of the 1,300 employees the company will hire there.

Amazon Web Services has had a presence in Spain since 2012 and is building more infrastructure to be able to host data in Spain for its customers who require it.

Back in April, Amazon Web Services and Google was chosen by Israel for a more than $1-billion (roughly Rs. 7,530 crores) project to provide cloud services for the country's public sector and military.

Amazon and Google beat out Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM in the tender for the four phase project known as "Nimbus", the Finance Ministry said.

They will establish local cloud sites in Israel with an initial investment of ILS 4 billion (roughly Rs. 9,180 crores). These sites will keep information within Israel's borders under strict security guidelines.

The four phases of the project include acquisition and construction of cloud infrastructure, formulating government policy for migrating to the cloud, integration, and migration, and control and optimisation of cloud activity.

Nimbus is a multi-year flagship project intended to provide a comprehensive solution for the provision of cloud services to the government, the defence system, and other groups in the economy, the ministry said.

© Thomson Reuters 2021