PM Anthony Albanese (left) with AWS CEO Matt Garman at the Seatle press conference. Photo: @AlboMP/X (Twitter)
Amazon is to sink $20 billion over five years on data centres in Melbourne and Sydney to support Cloud computing and artificial intelligence in Australia.
And the tech giant is to fund three new solar farms in Victoria (two) and Queensland (one) to help power the centres.
The news was announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman to journalists at the company’s Seattle headquarters in the US.
Albanese stopped off at the headquarters while on his way to Canada to attend the G7 summit.
“This significant investment will offer Australian industries the ability to take advantage of the revolutionary opportunities provided by artificial intelligence,” he says.
“It will build on Australia’s growing data centre infrastructure and contribute to our economic growth and resilience, including by providing more skilled jobs and AI-ready infrastructure.”
The new centres will include storage, networking, analytics, and other advanced, highly secure services to support Cloud and AI demand.
Garman says his company estimates that technology over the next decade will deliver a $600 billion-plus increase in Australia’s GDP, hence the need for energy projects.
He says the new solar farms will add to eight other wind and solar projects that Amazon already has in Australia that will deliver an output capable of powering up to 290,000 homes.
“These investments make Amazon the third largest purchaser of renewable energy in Australia; for five years in a row, Amazon has been the largest purchaser of renewable energy around the world,” Garman says.
When questioned about the use of nuclear power in Australia to power their centres, Garman says AWS will work with what is available to them.
“There’s no question that we will continue to need more and more power going forward. It kind of depends on the place, which sources of properties, that we choose.
“Sometimes it’s renewable sources, nuclear, sometimes it might even be hydro … whatever the location matches.”
He says demand for such services in Australia will be driven by the likes of CommBank, which is launching an AI factory (with AWS) to “innovate” up to four times faster than they already do.
“We also want to look at traditional industries,” he says.
Garman points out that AI was used to help Australia’s Olympic swimmers improve in the pool enough to win seven gold medals at the Paris Olympics.
AWS has already spent $9.1 billion in Australia since it opened in Sydney in 2012.
