On Tuesday, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced plans to invest $11 billion in Georgia through its cloud division, Amazon Web Services.
What Happened: This investment aims to bolster infrastructure for cloud computing and artificial intelligence technologies.
With the investment in Butts and Douglas counties, "we expect to create more than 550 well-paying jobs," said Roger Wehner, vice president of economic development at AWS.
See Also: Jeff Bezos Urged His Brother And Sister To Invest $10,000 In Amazon – The Stake Grew 15,499,900% And It’s Now Potentially Worth $1.5 Billion
The expansion of AI and cloud computing has also led to increased electricity consumption in the U.S.
The Electric Power Research Institute projects that by 2030, data centers could account for as much as 9% of the electricity produced in the U.S., more than twice their current usage.
Amazon has secured agreements with U.S. utilities, including Talen Energy in Pennsylvania and Entergy Corp (NYSE:ETR) in Mississippi, to power its data centers across the country.
Why It Matters: Amazon's initiative is part of a larger trend among tech giants to invest heavily in AI. Earlier this month, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced an $80 billion investment for fiscal 2025 to train AI models and deploy cloud applications.
In 2024, Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang also identified a $1 trillion opportunity.
"The world builds about $1 trillion worth of data centers. In a few years, $1 trillion worth of data centers will be all accelerated computing," he said during Nvidia's second-quarter earning call.
In December 2024, Amazon also decided to halt the development of its Inferentia AI chip, focusing instead on the Trainium chip to improve cost performance in AI model training.
Price Action: Amazon's stock fell 2.42% on Tuesday, closing at $222.11. However, it recovered slightly with a 0.11% gain in after-hours trading, according to Benzinga Pro data.
Photo by Sundry Photography via Shutterstock
Read Next:
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
