AWS unveils £8bn investment plan for the UK

• Hyperscaler commits to plough in the extra funds over a five-year period to bolster Blighty’s datacentre infrastructure
• UK government welcomes the promise of a massive GDP and jobs boost to the economy
• AWS financial commitment to the UK since 2020 now stands at £11bn 

US public cloud behemoth Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a hefty five-year £8bn investment plan for the UK – by 2028 – for building, operating and maintaining datacentres.

It’s a welcome boost to the UK treasury. According to AWS estimates, the multibillion-pound investment will contribute £14bn to the UK’s GDP over the five-year period and support some 14,000 jobs annually in local businesses. This number includes jobs spread across the hyperscaler’s datacentre supply chain.

The new investment marks a doubling down of AWS’ financial commitment to Britain, having previously ploughed £3bn into UK datacentre infrastructure between 2020 and 2023.

Rachel Reeves, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, welcomed the latest round of investment with open arms, bullishly claiming it “marked the start of an economic revival” and showed that Britain was “a place to do business”.

UK technology secretary Peter Kyle stressed the importance of digital advancement. “From increasing compute power to providing access to AI, it is vital that innovators have the infrastructure they need to grow our digital economy and drive breakthroughs,” he said.

AWS explained it wanted to “support the transformation of the UK’s digital economy” and wheeled in favourable survey findings for good measure.

According to an AWS‑commissioned poll conducted by Public First, 84% of respondents – who are AWS customers – apparently thought their business had saved money as a result of investing in cloud infrastructure, with an average cost saving of 28% compared to using on-premises infrastructure.

Around two-thirds of those canvassed said they had reduced energy consumption and improved sustainability as a result of using the cloud.

UK one of many AWS Regions

The hyperscaler arranges its facilities geographically into ‘AWS Regions’, a physical location where there is a cluster of datacentres. There are more than 30 AWS Regions spread across North America, Europe and Asia.

Each region consists of a minimum of three, isolated, and physically separate ‘Availability Zones’ (AZ). An AZ is one or more discrete datacentres, each of which has independent power, cooling and physical security, and is connected via redundant, ultra-low latency data transport network connections.

The UK AWS region was launched in 2016. Aside from three AZs it has two WaveLength Zones, two Edge Locations, and a Regional Edge Cache.

The additional UK investment comes hot on the heels of a new AWS Region in Malaysia, where the datacentre giant plans to invest $6.2bn over the next 14 years (by 2038). 

The launch of the new region means the hyperscaler now has 108 AZs across 34 regions, with plans to launch a further 18 AZs and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

- Ken Wieland, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV