Amazon Web Services plots £8bn investment in UK data centres

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to invest £8bn to build, maintain and operate a number of data centres in the UK over the next five years.

The tech giant’s cloud division estimates the cash injection will contribute £14bn to the UK’s total gross domestic product (GDP) through to 2028, and will support an average of over 14,000 full-time equivalent jobs every year at local businesses. 

Phil Le-Brun, director of enterprise strategy at AWS, told City A.M. that the funding is “part of our long standing AWS commitment to support growth and productivity across the country.” Amazon, he said, expects that opportunities from the investment will be spread evenly across the UK.

“I think it’s a really interesting opportunity this opens up for small and medium sized businesses,” Le-Brun continued.

“If we can get about half of the small and medium sized businesses who aren’t currently digital leaders to adopt technology such as cloud computing and AI, we believe this could create an estimated £38bn in additional value for the UK economy over the next five years, spread across the entire UK,” he explained.

The investment comes as big tech looks to build more data centres. As demand for AI and computing power rises globally, Silicon Valley’s giants are racing to claim space to fuel the technology.

Microsoft has committed £2.5bn to building AI infrastructure in the UK, including doubling its data centre space, while Google is investing $1bn (£790m) into a 33 acre data centre in Hertfordshire, to help it develop new AI models.

But data centres guzzle vast amounts of energy and quantities of water used to cool them. Experts from the University of California have predicted that by 2027, AI demand could lead to water withdrawal of between 4.2bn and 6.6bn cubic metres of water – nearly half of the UK’s annual consumption.

“It’s been a long standing approach within AWS to figure out ways of using less energy and even less water to run data centres,” said Le-Brun. All the electricity consumed by Amazon’s operations, including its data centres, was matched with 100 per cent renewable energy in 2023, he added.