Amazon announced it will invest €15.7 billion ($16.9 billion) in the Spanish branch of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The retail and cloud goliath didn't specify exactly what all those billions of euros would be spent on, but Amazon's announcement claims the dosh will support 17,500 full-time jobs.

"Jobs will be supported across industries including construction, facilities maintenance, engineering, and telecommunications," Amazon claimed.

The investment is an alteration of the online souk and bit barn builder's prior plans for the region. In 2021, it expected to spend just €2.5 billion in Spain and to create 1,300 jobs in the process.

Amazon claims the economic effect on Spain will be a €21.6 billion increase to the country's gross domestic product by 2033. That might sound like quite a bit at first, but consider that Spain's GDP is already over €1.4 trillion.

Much of Amazon's investment will be concentrated in the region of Aragón, which will see 40 percent of the new jobs. In addition, it claimed its current Aragón datacenters are already 100 percent powered by renewable energy and Amazon expects to be water positive - returning more water to the region than it takes - by 2030 with water reclamation and a program of fixing the municipal area's pipes for leaks.

"Since its arrival in Aragón, AWS has turned the region's potential for attracting technological investments into a reality," said Jorge Azcón, the president of the Aragón regional government. "It will definitively place Aragón on the map as a center of innovation and the cloud economy in Europe."

Spain isn't the only country in Europe to see an investment from Amazon on this level. Just last week The Register reported that the cloud provider set aside €7.8 billion for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany. These large budgets for expanding its datacenters are possible thanks to all the money Amazon is making - pegged at around $100 billion in revenue for the whole of FY2024. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/05/24/amazon_aws_spain/