(Calgary) Amazon on Monday announced the opening of a second cloud computing server center in Canada at the end of 2023, which will translate into billions of dollars of investment in the years to come.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the American e-commerce giant, said the new center would be located in the Calgary area to provide better service to Western Canada. Its other center is in the Montreal region.
The company did not specify how many Amazon employees would work directly at the new center, but said the project would maintain an estimated annual average of 409 direct jobs by 2037 through construction, facility maintenance, electricity needs and other support services.
The company also declined to disclose estimated initial capital costs for downtown Calgary, but said it plans to invest $ 4.3 billion by 2037 in the region through construction, costs of utilities and the purchase of goods and services from local businesses.
Amazon Web Services claims to have spent more than $ 1.4 billion between 2016 and 2021 to set up and manage its Montreal data center, and estimates that overall, it plans to invest $ 21 billion by 2037 in the existing infrastructure and the new Alberta facility.
AWS Canada Director Eric Gales said the investments come as the company sees growing interest in cloud services across a wide variety of industries.
“These investments we are making in additional infrastructure support the rapid growth we continue to experience with the adoption of AWS in Canada,” he said in a telephone interview.
AWS chose Calgary, he explained, because it is well located in Western Canada, is connected to national and international infrastructure and offers access to renewable energy that will allow the company to achieve its emission reduction targets.
“We are committed in Canada to having all of our AWS and Amazon infrastructure powered by renewable energy by 2025, and we are on track to achieve that goal. ”