Amazon said that the investment is expected to create at least 500 new high-skilled jobs while supporting thousands of other jobs in the AWS data center supply chain
In sum – what you need to know:
$10bn for North Carolina AI – AWS will invest $10 billion to expand data centers in North Carolina, driven by growing demand for generative AI and cloud computing.
New tech jobs, and related – the investment will create high-skilled roles in engineering, security and operations, while boosting jobs across construction and local supply chains.
AI innovation hub – politicians hailed the move as one of the largest in state history, reinforcing the state’s role in leading AI-driven economic growth.
Amazon has announced plans to invest an estimated $10 billion in North Carolina to expand its data center infrastructure to support AI and cloud computing technologies. The investment is expected to create at least 500 new high-skilled jobs while supporting thousands of other jobs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center supply chain.
The company said generative AI is driving increased demand for advanced cloud infrastructure and compute power, adding that its investment will support the future of AI from AWS data centers in North Carolina. The new cloud infrastructure will strengthen North Carolina’s position as an innovation hub, Amazon said.
The new high-skilled jobs will range from data center engineers and network specialists, to engineering operations managers, security specialists and other technical roles. In addition to these direct positions, this planned investment is expected to support thousands of local construction jobs and positions in the data center supply chain, as well as other jobs in the local community, the company added.
North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, said: “Artificial intelligence is changing the way we work and innovate, and 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.”
Amazon is set to invest nearly $100 billion in AWS infrastructure this year. In the final quarter of 2024 alone, the company allocated $26.3 billion to AI-related infrastructure. According to CEO Andy Jassy, similar spending levels are expected each quarter throughout 2025, totaling approximately $100 billion for the year.
“The vast majority of that capex is on AI for AWS,” Jassy noted during a previous earnings call. “AI represents, for sure, the biggest opportunity since cloud, and probably the biggest technology shift in business since the internet. So, I think that both our business, our customers and shareholders will be happy, medium to long-term, that we’re pursuing the capital opportunity and the business opportunity in AI.”
Rival companies Alphabet and Microsoft are also committing tens of billions of dollars annually to expand data centers, chips, servers and other infrastructure powering their AI offerings. Alphabet—the parent company of Google—previously announced plans to allocate $75 billion in 2025 toward AI initiatives in Google Cloud. Microsoft President Brad Smith also previously stated that the company intends to invest $80 billion in AI infrastructure for Azure by the end of its current fiscal year in June.
AWS and HUMAIN — a new Saudi company leading AI development in the country — have recently announced a major partnership to invest more than $5 billion in the field of AI.
The collaboration will help build a special “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia and drive AI adoption across the region and the world.
AWS noted that this new AI Zone will feature cutting-edge AWS infrastructure, including high-performance servers, advanced semiconductors and UltraCluster networking to speed up AI training and inference. It will also offer AWS services like SageMaker, Bedrock and Amazon Q, which help organizations build and run generative AI (genAI) applications.
This initiative builds on AWS’s previously announced $5.3 billion investment to launch a new AWS infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia by 2026.
