Amazon Web Services to invest $17.02 billion in data centres in Spain

MADRID (Reuters) -Tech giant Amazon's cloud computing unit AWS will invest 15.7 billion euros ($17.02 billion) in data centres in Spain's northeastern Aragon region, it said on Wednesday, significantly boosting its expansion plan in the country.

The Aragon government said in a separate statement the investment would be carried out over 10 years in the region that is already a hub for Amazon in Spain, calling the plan "the largest technology investment in Spain and southern Europe".

Amazon said in a statement the new plan replaced a previous one announced in 2021, when the company earmarked 2.5 billion euros for Spain.

The investment will support the creation of an estimated average of 17,500 jobs in local companies per year through 2033, Amazon said.

"Amazon Web Services' decision to choose Spain places us at the forefront of technology innovation and Artificial Intelligence in Europe," Digital Transformation Minister Jose Luis Escriva was quoted by Amazon.

The U.S. tech giant said it will power its data centres in Spain fully with renewable energy.

Different cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft's Azure have been investing heavily across Europe to build data centres and have clustered in the same regions in the past.

($1 = 0.9224 euros)

(Reporting by Inti Landauro and Supantha Mukherjee, editing by Andrei Khalip)