The company, along with the Ohio governor’s office, announced the plan Monday. The investment boosts the total the company has committed to spending in Ohio by the end of the decade to more than $23 billion.
The $10 billion will allow Amazon to expand its data centers outside of Central Ohio to new sites in communities across the state. The new data centers will contain computer servers, data storage drives, networking equipment, and other forms of technology infrastructure used to power cloud computing, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, the company said in a joint statement with Gov. Mike DeWine.
The exact locations for that investment have not been finalized, according to the statement. Investment plans are contingent upon the execution of long-term energy service agreements.
“As reliance on digital services continues to grow, so does the importance of data centers; they are critical to today’s modern economy,” DeWine said in the announcement. “AWS’s substantial investment in Ohio will help keep our state at the forefront of the global technology.”
Amazon Web Services’ growth is part of a wave of stadium-sized data centers that have popped up all over central Ohio. The centers consume huge amounts of electricity to run. Google has described them as “the engines behind the digital services” that “help keep the Internet up and running.”
Consumer-facing brands like Amazon, Google and Meta all have developed centers, as well as less familiar names like Quality Technology Services and CyrusOne. From the outside, they can look like large factories. Inside, they often employ 20 to 30 or so workers when operational.
State and local governments have granted hundreds of millions in tax breaks for the development of the centers. Grid operators, though, worry the facilities could overburden the available power supply.
Last year, Amazon announced it would spend $7.8 billion in Ohio. That was on top of $6 billion already invested through 2022.
Amazon opened its first Ohio data center in 2016 and has since invested $10.3 billion in Ohio. The company estimates it has contributed about $3.8 billion in total gross domestic product to the state between 2015-2023.
Today’s announcement brought the company’s planned investment in Ohio between 2015 and the end of 2030 to more than $23 billion. This represents the second-largest planned investment by a single private sector company in the state’s history, the governor’s office said, after the $20 billion Intel computer-chip complex being built outside Columbus.
“Today, we reaffirm our long-term commitment to Ohio with plans to invest an additional $10 billion to expand our data center infrastructure in greater Ohio to drive innovation in AI for customers,” Roger Wehner, vice president of economic development at Amazon Web Services, said in a statement.
“This expanded investment is expected to create new, well-paying jobs, boost Ohio’s GDP, and further cement our partnership with the state. We are also proud to continue expanding the reach of workforce development and educational programs that equip Ohio’s next generation of tech talent through strong public and private partnerships.”
JobsOhio President and CEO J.P. Nauseef said Monday that Amazon Web Services’ investment has helped make Ohio one of the nation’s foremost technology centers, helping to attract business innovators to the state. JobsOhio was one of multiple economic development teams collaborating with Amazon to support the expansion.
“AWS was the first major cloud provider in our state and their success has helped pave the way for the explosive growth we’re seeing now,” Nauseef said in a statement.
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