Amazon Has $8B Plan for Ohio Data Centers

Amazon may be growing disinterested in industrial real estate … and offices … and retail. Data centers, however, remain the apple of the e-commerce giant’s eye.

The tech company plans to spend $7.8 billion to expand Amazon Web Services — its cloud computing unit — in Ohio, Bisnow reported. That investment will take the form of developing additional data centers in the state, though site selection has not yet been determined.

It marks the second-largest private sector investment in state history. The first was Intel’s $20 billion investment to build a chip plant last year.

Amazon has found a welcome home in Ohio, where it is one of the largest employers in the private sector. In the last seven years, it has spent $6.3 billion in the state, constructing data centers in multiple counties.

The latest investment in the state is expected to produce hundreds of permanent jobs and thousands of construction jobs, according to an Amazon official.

Data centers are an important part of the commercial real estate picture, powering servers for technology across the country and the world. Site location is critical, as they often need water to remain cool due to the enormous amount of heat they generate, making drought-affected climates less useful for the sector.

There’s no drought in Amazon’s data center investments, though. This year, it agreed to invest $35 billion to build data center campuses in Virginia by 2040. The campuses are expected to create thousands of jobs.

The data center expansion stands in stark contrast to the pullback other commercial sectors are seeing from the Seattle-based behemoth. Last year, it scrapped its rapid proliferation of warehouses and last-mile distribution centers after biting off more than it could chew.

The company has also retreated on multiple fronts in the retail sector, abandoning plans for its first big-box store, seeing its Amazon Fresh concept grow stale and pulling the plug on multiple cashierless stores.

— Holden Walter-Warner