Amazon says to invest 15.7 billion euros in Spain

Amazon's cloud computing division AWS will invest 15.7 billion euros (17 billion dollars) in data centres in Spain's northeastern Aragon region through to 2033, the US tech giant said Wednesday. The investment will create around 17,500 indirect jobs in local companies and contribute 21.6 billion euros to Spain's gross domestic product during th period, Amazon said in a statement.

"This new commitment by AWS spotlights our country's attractiveness as a strategic tech hub in southern Europe,"Spanish Digital Transformation Minister Jose Luis Escriva was quoted by Amazon in the statement.

The head of the regional government of Aragon, Jorge Azcon, said in a message posted on social network X that this "is the biggest economic investment in the history of our region".

A pioneer of e-commerce, Amazon's AWS also dominates cloud computing with 31 percent of the market at the end of 2023, according to Stocklytics. But rivals Microsoft and Google are gaining ground, with 24 percent and 11 percent market share of the cloud business, respectively.

The race has become particularly heated since the deployment of ChatGPT-style artificial intelligence that the cloud companies are offering to clients.(AFP)