What AWS’s Investment in AI Data Centres Means for Australia
With governments worldwide recognising AI as a strategic national asset, Australia is now emerging as an attractive destination for technology giants seeking to establish networks to support Gen AI demands.
From healthcare and finance to mining and agriculture, Australian businesses are increasingly turning to AI-powered solutions to enhance productivity, automate complex processes and unlock new revenue streams.
This surge in demand has created a pressing need for scalable, secure and sustainable data centre infrastructure capable of handling the massive computational workloads that modern AI systems require.
Investing into this opportunity, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it will invest AU$20bn to expand data centre infrastructure across Australia by 2029.
This investment is the largest technology commitment in Australian history and aims to position the country as a global leader in AI development.
AWS expands its renewable energy portfolio
AWS’s investment includes three new solar farms across Victoria and Queensland states to power the expanded infrastructure.
AI is a once-in-a-generation transformation and Amazon is pleased to be empowering all Australians to innovate at scale through this investment
European Energy, a renewable energy developer, will deliver and operate the projects, with Amazon purchasing more than 170 megawatts of combined capacity from the installations.
Amazon currently operates eight solar and wind projects across New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.
When all 11 renewable energy projects become operational, they will generate more than 1.4 million megawatt hours of carbon-free energy annually, sufficient to power approximately 290,000 Australian homes each year.
The company also ranked as the third-largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in Australia in 2024 and maintains its position as the largest worldwide.
A study by consulting firm Accenture found that Australian organisations migrating compute-intensive AI workloads to AWS can reduce carbon emissions by up to 94% compared with on-premises data centres.
AWS builds on existing Australian infrastructure presence
The expansion builds on AWS's existing presence in Australia, which began in 2012 with the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific region in Sydney.
- AU$20 billion investment from Amazon to expand data centre infrastructure by 2029
- Strengthening Australia’s cloud and AI capabilities
- Three new solar farms in Victoria and Queensland will support infrastructure expansion
- AWS has trained 400,000+ people in Australia since 2017 to develop digital skills, and will continue to support generative AI programs like AWS AI Spring Australia and AWS Generative AI Accelerator
The company added a Melbourne region in 2023 and introduced Australia's first AWS Local Zones in Perth.
Local Zones are infrastructure deployments that place compute, storage and database services closer to end users for applications requiring low latency.
Additionally, Amazon Bedrock, the company's managed Gen AI service that allows organisations to build AI applications using foundation models, launched in the Sydney region in April 2024.
The Australian government also announced a partnership with AWS in July 2024 to provide a classified cloud service for national security and defence applications.
The Department of Industry, Science and Resources estimates that AI and automation could contribute AU$600bn annually to Australia's gross domestic product by 2030.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says: “This is the largest investment our country has seen from a global technology provider and is an exciting opportunity for Australia to build AI capability using secure, resilient infrastructure,.”
AWS accelerates AI adoption through training programmes
AWS’s investment follows the launch of AWS AI Spring Australia, which accelerates AI adoption across different sectors and industries.
The programme includes the AWS Gen AI Accelerator for early-stage Gen AI startups and AWS AI Launchpad for enterprises beginning their generative AI implementation.
Already, AWS has trained more than 400,000 people across Australia since 2017 through various skills programmes.
The company operates a Work-Based Learning Program for data centre operations, which provides 12 months of training for technical roles.
Now, Amazon's AI Ready initiative aims to deliver free AI skills training to two million people globally by 2025.
The company collaborates with educational institutions, industry partners and government agencies to develop training programmes for technology roles and works with hundreds of organisations across Australia, including enterprise, public sector and startup customers.
“We're proud to be expanding our world-class data centre infrastructure, bringing more renewable energy projects online, and supporting the country's vision to be a global AI leader,” says Matt Garman, CEO of AWS.
AWS has committed to several infrastructure initiatives globally, including the introduction of a new infrastructure region in Chile earlier this year.
“AI is a once-in-a-generation transformation and Amazon is pleased to be empowering all Australians to innovate at scale through this investment,” Matt concludes.
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