Amazon has broken ground on a $10 billion data center campus it is constructing in Richmond County, North Carolina.

Politicians and members of the community gathered for the ceremony at the site of the data center, on the Energy Way Industrial Park.

The cloud and e-commerce giant announced its plan for a $10 billion investment in digital infrastructure in North Carolina earlier this year, without going into specifics of the project.

It is expected that the data center campus will feature up to 20 buildings at full build-out, each of which is likely to span more than 200,000 sq ft (18,580 sqm).

The data center will be located near the Sherwood H Smith Jr energy complex, a power plant operated by Duke Energy producing more than 2.24GW of output via natural gas turbines. It has not been revealed how the data center will be powered, what its eventual capacity will be, or when it might open.

Amazon has promised the development will create 500 permanent jobs. The company could receive tax breaks from Richmond County in the form of a 50 percent property tax reduction and a 65 percent personal property tax relief over a 20-year period, but has not received any state incentives from North Carolina.

"This marks the beginning of a new chapter for Richmond County as we build the infrastructure that will power tomorrow's economy,” said North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt. “Amazon's investment - one of the largest in our state's history - positions North Carolina at the forefront of artificial intelligence and cloud innovation for decades to come. I'm proud to celebrate this milestone and look forward to the impact this project will have on our communities."

Amazon claims to have invested $12 billion in North Carolina since 2010, though much of this is likely to be in businesses unrelated to data centers. The company’s AWS public cloud platform does not currently have a region based in the state.