Amazon Web Services is upping the ante on its data center investments in Ohio as the cloud computing provider seeks to meet soaring demand for digital infrastructure and applications powered by artificial intelligence.
The Amazon subsidiary is increasing its planned investment in the state through 2030 by $10 billion to $23.8 billion, it said in a release Monday. That represents a 72% increase from the $13.8 billion AWS had previously budgeted.
Ohio has one of the fastest-growing data center sectors in the United States, with Google, Meta, Microsoft and DBT all developing data centers totaling multiple billions of dollars in investment value. The availability of developable land, a skilled workforce, a temperate climate and energy infrastructure have helped lure data center developers.
Tech giants and real estate developers have been racing to build data centers as companies of all stripes look to bolster everything from digital file storage to powering electronic commerce. The rise of AI has further accelerated the need for larger and more powerful data centers, as AI-enabled applications require vastly more energy.
Some governments are stepping up to help with the construction costs. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, this month unveiled plans to develop a $10 billion data center near Monroe, Louisiana, that would be the company’s largest data center campus in the world after the state passed an incentive program that offers tax breaks for data center projects.
In Ohio, the state's Data Center Tax Abatement Program offers full exemption from the sales tax on construction materials, computer equipment, mechanical and electrical equipment, cooling systems and power infrastructure once a company invests at least $100 million over three years and maintains an annual payroll greater than $1.5 million.
The new AWS data centers “will contain computer servers, data storage drives, networking equipment and other forms of technology infrastructure used to power cloud computing, including artificial intelligence and machine learning," according to Monday's release.
AWS did not disclose the locations where it will construct the new data centers or which existing facilities will be expanded, but a company spokeswoman told CoStar News that it's considering up to eight new sites. Final decisions on facility locations “are contingent upon the execution of long-term energy service agreements,” AWS said.
The company operates five data centers in the Columbus market but said in the release it will “expand its data centers outside of Central Ohio in additional communities across the state.”
AWS opened its first data center in Ohio in 2016 and now has data centers in Franklin, Licking and Union counties. Those facilities include a 459,000-square-foot data center at 2570 Beech Road in New Albany and a 290,638-square-foot data center at 4400 Leppert Road in Hilliard.
AWS last month also announced it would develop a $2 billion data center at 11793 Vans Valley Road in Sunbury.
The $23.8 billion investment by AWS would be the second largest in Ohio history by a single private company if completed, according to the release.