Amazon may be less and less interested in industrial real estate…as well as offices…and retail. However, data centers remain the apple of the eye for the e-commerce giant.
The tech company plans to spend $7.8 billion to expand Amazon Web Services (its cloud computing unit) in Bisnow, Ohio report. The investment will come in the form of developing more data centers in the state, though no sites have yet been identified.
It marks the second-largest private sector investment in the state’s history. The first is that Intel invested $20 billion last year to build a chip factory.
Amazon has found a welcome home in Ohio, where it is one of the largest employers in the private sector. The company has spent $6.3 billion in the state over the past seven years, building data centers in multiple counties.
The latest investment in the state is expected to create hundreds of permanent jobs and thousands of construction jobs, Amazon officials said.
Data centers are a vital part of commercial real estate, powering technology servers across the country and around the world. Site location is critical as they generate a lot of heat and therefore often require water to keep them cool, making the drought-affected climate less effective for the industry.
However, Amazon’s data center investment has not dried up. This year, it agreed to invest $35 billion to build a data center campus in Virginia by 2040. The parks are expected to create thousands of jobs.
The expansion of the data center contrasts with the shrinkage of the Seattle-based giant’s other business units. Last year, the company abandoned its rapidly expanding warehouse and last-mile distribution center after eating too much.
The company has also retreated on multiple fronts in retail, abandoning plans to open its first large-scale store as the Amazon Fresh concept became obsolete and canceling multiple cashless stores.
— holden walter warner
