A power substation near the LC1 CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Virginia, on March 27, 2024.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon plans to spend $10 billion on new data centers in North Carolina to expand its artificial intelligence infrastructure, the company said Wednesday.
Amazon has earmarked up to $100 billion this year on capital expenditures, with the lion’s share going to AI-related projects. Similar to other major tech companies, Amazon is racing to build out its capacity to power AI tasks in order to keep pace with rivals including Microsoft, Google and OpenAI.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has called generative AI a “once-in-a-lifetime type of business opportunity.”
The investment in North Carolina will create roughly 500 jobs in the state, Amazon said.
“Generative AI is driving increased demand for advanced cloud infrastructure and compute power, and our investment will support the future of AI from AWS data centers in the Tar Heel State,” the company wrote in a blog post.
The company said in January it would spend at least $11 billion in Georgia to build new data centers to support cloud computing and AI demand.
Amazon has announced a slew of generative AI products over the past year, including its own language models, Trainium chips, a shopping chatbot and a marketplace for third-party models called Bedrock. It has also invested $8 billion in AI startup Anthropic, which is known for its Claude chatbot.
