US public cloud behemoth Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a hefty five-year £8bn investment plan for the UK – by 2028 – for building, operating and maintaining datacentres.
According to AWS projections, the multibillion-pound investment will add £14 billion to the UK’s GDP over five years and sustain about 14,000 employment in local firms each year.
This figure covers employment from across the hyperscale’s datacenter supply chain.
The new investment marks a doubling down of AWS’ financial commitment to Britain, having previously ploughed £3bn into UK datacentre infrastructure between 2020 and 2023.
Rachel Reeves, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, welcomed the latest round of investment with open arms, bullishly claiming it “marked the start of an economic revival” and showed that Britain was “a place to do business”.
UK technology secretary Peter Kyle stressed the importance of digital advancement. “From increasing compute power to providing access to AI, it is vital that innovators have the infrastructure they need to grow our digital economy and drive breakthroughs,” he said.
AWS explained it wanted to “support the transformation of the UK’s digital economy” and wheeled in favourable survey findings for good measure.
The UK AWS region was launched in 2016. Aside from three AZs, it includes two WaveLength Zones, two Edge Locations, and a Regional Edge Cache.
The increased UK investment follows the launch of a new AWS Region in Malaysia, where the datacenter giant intends to invest $6.2 billion over the next 14 years (by 2038).
With the addition of the new region, the hyperscaler now has 108 AZs spread across 34 regions, with plans to deploy another 18 AZs and six additional AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
