Amazon to invest $7.8B more in Ohio to boost data center operations

Amazon will boost its data center operations in Ohio as part of a massive new investment in the Midwestern state by the company’s cloud-computing segment.

The estimated $7.8 billion investment from Amazon Web Services will go toward new data centers with “computer servers, data storage drives, networking equipment and other forms of technology infrastructure used to power cloud computing,” according to a Monday press release from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s office. It will do so before the start of 2030. 

The newly announced move to up its Ohio data center operations will add to the $6.3 billion Amazon said it has previously invested in Buckeye State in the past seven years, bringing the total to a projected $14.1 billion.

The governor’s office said where the upcoming data centers will be constructed will be revealed “at a later date” once Amazon chooses from the “numerous” sites in central Ohio it has been considering. Franklin and Licking counties are home to existing Amazon data center campuses, according to the governor’s office and the company. 

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“This enormous capital investment further solidifies Ohio as the tech center of the Midwest and positions us for a bright future as cloud computing and artificial intelligence are more integrated into the economy and our everyday lives,” Jon Husted, Ohio’s lieutenant governor, said in the release.

Ohio will see 230 direct jobs arise in connection to the $7.8 billion investment, per JobsOhio CEO JP Nauseef. On top of those new positions, he estimated it would also bring some 1,000 support roles to the state.

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AWS’s workforce in Ohio last year included nearly 1,000 direct employees, according to the governor’s office. In April, as Amazon reported its first-quarter earnings, it said over 1.465 million people worked either full-time or part-time for the company across the globe.

For the quarter, the company said its net sales came in at $122.58 billion total, roughly $21.35 billion of which came from AWS. Net income was $3.72 billion.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky noted during the earnings call that AWS customers “continue to evaluate ways to optimize their cloud spending in response to these tough economic conditions in the first quarter.” He also said the company was “continuing to invest in infrastructure to support AWS customer needs, including investments to support large language models and generative AI.”

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AWS saw $80.1 billion in net sales in 2022, marking a nearly 29% increase from the prior year.