AWS to invest £8bn in building out UK datacentre footprint over next five years

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pledged to invest £8bn between now and 2028 in the development and maintenance of new datacentres in the UK.

The public cloud giant claims its five-year datacentre investment plan will add an estimated £14bn to the UK’s total gross domestic product by 2028, and support an average of 14,000 full-time equivalent jobs on an annual basis across local UK businesses.

“These positions [will] all form part of the AWS datacentre supply chain – ranging from construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other jobs within the broader local economy,” the company said in a statement announcing its investment plans.

AWS opened its first UK datacentre region in December 2016, in London, and has since expanded its infrastructure footprint to include three availability zones and several edge computing setups and locations, spanning the capital and Manchester too.

According to AWS’s calculations, this five-year investment commitment means the company is on course to have spent more than £11bn between 2020 and 2028 on building out its datacentre footprint in the UK, having previously invested £3bn in the three years to 2023.

The reason for this investment is the growing demand the company claims to be seeing from companies of all sizes and vertical markets for its range of public cloud services.

“Organisations of all sizes and across all industries are using AWS – from the fastest growing startups, to small and medium-sized businesses, the largest enterprises, public sector organisations, educational institutions and government agencies,” said AWS in the statement.

Since AWS opened its first UK region, adoption of its technologies within the UK public sector has grown dramatically, as exemplified by sales data from the UK government’s Digital Marketplace portal.

When AWS opened its UK datacentre region in December 2016, the company had secured a modest £2.93m in spend through the UK government’s flagship cloud procurement framework, G-Cloud, since it began in 2012. Over the intervening years, the government’s Digital Marketplace sales portal confirms the company has achieved sales of more than £940m.

Furthermore, as previously reported by Computer Weekly, the company made headlines in January 2024 after it emerged that it had made more money across three multimillion-pound government contracts that went live on the same day in December 2023 than it had previously amassed during its decade-long participation in G-Cloud.

Tanuja Randery, vice-president and managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at AWS, said the investment comes at a potential tipping point for the UK digital economy.

“The next few years could be among the most pivotal for the UK’s digital and economic future, as organisations of all sizes across the country increasingly embrace technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) to help them accelerate innovation, increase productivity, and compete on the global stage,” said Randery.  

“We’re proud to announce our plans to invest £8bn in digital and AI infrastructure over the next five years to help meet the growing needs of our customers and partners, and support the transformation of the UK’s digital economy.”

News of the investment comes at a time when AWS’s hold on the UK cloud infrastructure market is coming under scrutiny from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).