AWS looks to invest US$1.8bn in expanding Brazil datacenters by 2034

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will invest 10.1bn reais (US$1.8bn) to expand its Brazilian datacenter infrastructure, in both existing sites and new ones, over 10 years.

The announcement was made by company executives at the Planalto presidential palace in Brasília on Wednesday in an event attended by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

During the event, federal development bank BNDES launched a 2bn-real financing line for datacenters in the country, part of an industrial policy previously announced by the government.

AWS’s announcement came on the same day Scala Data Centers unveiled a US$50bn datacenter complex project for Rio Grande do Sul state, comprising 17 buildings.

The AWS investment will be made in the cloud and connectivity infrastructure that the company currently maintains in São Paulo state, with the goal of meeting growing demand for cloud services and generative artificial intelligence, it said.

The AWS cloud region in São Paulo is the company’s only one in Latin America. The US giant and public cloud leader is also developing a US$5bn cloud region in Mexico’s Querétaro, which is expected to be launched in early 2025.

With three availability zones, or unique datacenters, the São Paulo cloud region went live in 2011 as one of the first public cloud players in Latin America. It was also AWS's eighth worldwide. 

Currently, AWS reports 108 availability zones across 34 cloud regions, with announced plans for 18 more zones and six more regions, including Mexico's.

Each availability zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant and ultra-low fiber networks.

AWS’s data infrastructure in Brazil also includes Edge Locations in Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, as well as Regional Edge Caches in São Paulo. These infrastructures complement the main datacenters to offer customers even lower latencies for their applications.

AWS does not provide details, but the new investments in São Paulo are likely to go both to expanding the capacity of the current zones and to developing new zones and edge structures.

The amount planned for the next 10 years adds to the 19.2bn-real it claims to have invested in the country between 2011, when it launched its cloud region, and 2023.

According to the company, those investments already made contributed approximately 24.1bn reais to the country's GDP during the period.

ENERGY

Like other players in the sector, AWS promises to direct part of the new investments to the provision of clean energy sources to supply the sites.

In Brazil, Amazon has made investments in a 122MW solar park and a 49.5MW wind farm. Together, these projects have the capacity to generate more than 530GWh of clean energy annually, it claims.

AWS also said it has a partnership with the company Kilimo to provide AI-based irrigation recommendations to farmers near the Tietê river, in the Greater São Paulo area. 

"Using intelligent monitoring and machine learning, Kilimo’s solution, developed on AWS, will calculate water consumption, monitor soil quality, and conserve approximately 200mn liters of water annually," said the company.

AWS also pledges to invest in workforce training for cloud and datacenter capabilities. 

Such commitments include a program with mining company Nexa Resources to train 80,000 people in cloud fundamentals by 2025, a 15mn-real investment in Escola da Nuvem (cloud school project) to increase cloud certifications, and initiatives with companies and local governments.