The cloud computing giant says that the investment will fulfill its needs for cloud and AI more than a year after it acquired a data center at a nuclear power station in the state.
The tech giant and its Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit said they already have identified two future data center campuses in the state: one in Salem Township in the northeastern part of the state and another one in Falls Township in Bucks County, near Philadelphia. Amazon also said “multiple additional Pennsylvania communities are under consideration,” which means the state will soon be home to a number of new data center campuses.
Amazon said in a news release that the investment will lead to 1,250 “new high-skilled jobs and supporting thousands more in the AWS data center supply chain.”
Last year, Seattle-based Amazon purchased Talen’s data center campus, known as Cumulus Data, for $650 million, according to a Talen investor presentation. The sale included all the land, power infrastructure, powered shell and intangibles on the data center campus.
And this past March, Falls Township approved a plan by NorthPoint Development to develop a data center campus at the site of a former U.S. Steel property but did not disclose Amazon would be involved.
Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud computing provider in the world in terms of market share.
The company is expected to spend $100 billion this year alone on ramping up its infrastructure for AI, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in an earnings call with investors and analysts this past February. In the fourth quarter of its last fiscal year, Jassy said Amazon spent $26.3 billion on its infrastructure.
“When AWS is expanding its capex, particularly in what we think is one of these once-in-a-lifetime type of business opportunities like AI represents, I think it’s actually quite a good sign, medium to long term, for the AWS business,” said Jassy in response to an analyst question. “And I actually think that spending this capital to pursue this opportunity, which from our perspective, we think virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it and with inference being a core building block, just like compute and storage and database.”
Just last week, Amazon said it would spend $10 billion on data center infrastructure in North Carolina.
Amazon and other vendors like Google and Microsoft have been expanding their investments in the cloud and AI race. Google and its parent company Alphabet said it would spend $75 billion on data center infrastructure this year, while Microsoft has committed to spend $80 billion.
