Amazon Pledges $10B To North Carolina Data Center Sector After Securing Incentives
Amazon has committed $10B to a rural North Carolina county as part of its race to develop improved artificial intelligence models.
The investment will directly create 500 jobs and indirectly support thousands of local construction jobs, Amazon said, although the company did not reveal any specific development plans Wednesday. The commitment comes the same week that the Richmond county government passed a sweeping incentives package to lure the e-commerce and cloud computing giant to the area.
“I am pleased that North Carolina will stay at the forefront of all that’s ahead as we continue to attract top technology companies like Amazon,” Josh Stein, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, said in a statement released by the conglomerate. “Amazon’s investment is among the largest in state history and will bring hundreds of good-paying jobs and an economic boost to Richmond County.”
The 10-figure investment includes building out community education and training programs to support Amazon's rapidly growing data center footprint.
The company intends to upgrade facilities and equipment at colleges, technical schools, universities and workforce development organizations across the county to “grow training programs and work-based learning opportunities that prepare job seekers for high-demand career pathways in the growing field of data center construction and operations,” according to the release.
Planned programs include bringing industry experts into classrooms, two-day certification courses and apprenticeship programs with Amazon Web Services, the company’s massive cloud computing business that generated over $29B in first-quarter sales.
The cash commitment came a day after Richmond County commissioners approved an incentives package specifically for Amazon, which hadn’t publicly disclosed that it was seeking a deal with the local government.
Commissioners agreed to provide Amazon with annual cash grants to offset some of the property taxes on the real estate and vehicles at any data center it develops in the area, The Richmond Observer reported.
County Manager Bryan Land said the partnership “will truly transform our community in ways that we cannot imagine” during the commission meeting Tuesday, according to the Richmond Observer. Land said the project would create construction jobs over the next five or six years, although no development plans were publicly disclosed.
“The [Richmond County] data center project is still in the early stages,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email Thursday.
Richmond County spans roughly 475 square miles with a population of around 43,000 people in 2020. Rockingham, the county seat, has a population of 9,243. The median household income for the county’s 16,863 households is $43K.
Amazon and the rest of the tech giants are pouring trillions of dollars into data center development as they race to improve artificial intelligence models to deploy them into profit-generating business applications.
Microsoft has pledged to spend at least $80B on data center development this year, Meta will reportedly spend at least $65B, and Google’s parent company Alphabet has set aside $75B towards data center capacity. Amazon has pledged to spend at least $100B.
“It is true we could be growing faster were it not for some of the constraints on capacity,” CEO Andy Jassy told analysts on the firm’s Q4 earnings call in February.
