Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to invest $11 billion in the state of Georgia to expand its infrastructure in the US to support the growing demand for generative AI, AI, and other cloud technologies.
The demand for AI is expanding at such an exponential rate that market research firm IDC expects that global spending on AI-supporting technologies will surpass $749 billion by 2028 — and nearly 67% of the projected $227 billion AI spending in 2025 will come from enterprises embedding AI capabilities into their core business operations.
AWS’ investment, which comes after the infusion of $18.5 billion in the state since 2010, can be seen as part of parent Amazon’s plans to invest in building AI-enabled data centers.
Last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.
Unlike traditional data centers, the new data centers are likely to be used to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications.
AI-enabled data centers don’t come cheap either — whether they are new or are upgraded. They must support much higher power densities than traditional data centers. On top of that, an AI-enabled data center needs liquid cooling, advanced networking infrastructure, and advanced infrastructure management software.
However, AWS did point out that it plans to make its Thailand data center “flexible enough to efficiently run GPUs (graphics processing units) for traditional workloads or AI and machine learning models.”
And AWS isn’t the only cloud services provider that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).
Last week, Microsoft president Brad Smith said that the company was on track to invest around $80 billion this fiscal year to build out AI-enabled data centers.
Separately, AWS said that it had launched a new region in Thailand with three availability zones. Typically, AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.
Thailand is the company’s fourteenth Region in Asia Pacific, joining existing Regions in Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, as well as the Beijing and Ningxia China Regions.
AWS has announced plans to build out 15 more Availability zones and five more Regions in Germany, Taiwan, Mexico, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and New Zealand.
Source:: Network World