Amazon Web Services (AWS) will invest €7.8 billion ($8.47bn) in its sovereign cloud infrastructure in Germany through 2040.
The Sovereign Cloud region will be AWS' first and located in the state of Brandenburg, Germany. It is expected to launch by the end of 2025.
“This investment reinforces our commitment to offer customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available in the cloud. We're investing heavily in new local talent and infrastructure, which will help provide the operational sovereignty our customers require," said Max Peterson, vice president of Sovereign Cloud at AWS.
"This is an exciting milestone, and we're looking forward to the ways that our customers and partners across Europe will drive further innovation with the AWS European Sovereign Cloud."
AWS expects that this will bring around 2,800 full-time equivalent jobs to Germany each year, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other jobs within the broader local economy.
Additional roles will be created that are high-skilled permanent positions needed to build and operate the Sovereign Cloud including software engineers, systems developers, and solutions architects.
“High performing, reliable, and secure infrastructure is the most important prerequisite for an increasingly digitalized economy and society. Brandenburg is making progress here. In recent years, we have set on a course to invest in modern and sustainable data center infrastructure in our state, strengthening Brandenburg as a business location,” said Prof. Dr. Jörg Steinbach, Brandenburg’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Labour and Energy. “State-of-the-art data centers for secure cloud computing are the basis for a strong digital economy. I am pleased Amazon Web Services (AWS) has chosen Brandenburg for a long-term investment in its cloud computing infrastructure for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud."
AWS first announced plans for a European Sovereign Cloud region in October 2023.
In September 2023, Virtus Data Centres revealed that it was planning a 300MW data center campus in Brandenburg. Google has a cloud region in Brandenburg.
Oracle has launched two sovereign cloud regions in Frankfurt, Germany, and Madrid, Spain. Digital Realty is the host partner for the EU Sovereign Cloud region location in Madrid, and Equinix is the host partner for the region location in Frankfurt.
Microsoft and Google also have sovereign cloud offerings but are being marketed through partners. In 2021, Orange and Capgemini launched France-based cloud company Bleu to sell Microsoft Azure services from local data centers. In January 2024, Bleu confirmed that it would launch at the end of the year.
Google has partnered with T-Systems in Germany, Thales in France, and Proximus in Belgium and Luxembourg. A leaked report suggests Google views its trusted partner cloud initiative as its "most important program" and believes it can corner a $100 billion market in Europe and Asia via data sovereignty-compliant clouds.
In April 2024, Vultr launched a sovereign and private cloud offering that would be deployed in its 32 data center locations across six continents.
