• Amazon Web Services confirms that it plans to invest R30.4 billion in cloud infrastructure in South Africa before the end of the decade.
• AWS originally signalled its intent to invest R44 billion between 2018 to 2029, R15.6 billion of which has already been allocated.
• Thus far, investments made by AWS locally have resulted in 5 700 full-time jobs being created across various sectors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has big plans for South Africa. The company signalled its intent a few years back, noting that it plans to invest as much as R44 billion between 2018 and 2029 on cloud infrastructure locally.

To date R15.6 billion has already been allocated towards cloud infrastructure and associated investments in SA, and today AWS reaffirmed its commitment to highlight that it does indeed plan to invest R30.4 billion before the end of this decade.

“AWS had long been committed to South Africa and this infrastructure investment adds to our ongoing local story, where one of our foundational capabilities – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – was developed by engineers in Cape Town back in 2006,” notes Amrote Abdella, GM for AWS Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The investment already has a ripple effect on numerous local businesses, and has helped establish training and skilling programs for the local workforce, supported community engagement through various initiatives, and created sustainability initiatives across the country,” she adds in a press release sent to Hypertext.

According to AWS, said ripple effects locally include the following:

• “5 700 full-time jobs created across sectors such as telecommunications, non-residential construction, electricity generation, facilities maintenance, and data centre operations.
• The AWS Equity Equivalent Investment Programme aims to invest over R365 million in developing 100% Black-owned small IT businesses in the country through December 2026.
• A 10-megawatt solar plant in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, which is expected to generate up to 28,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy per year
• R360m in AWS Activate cloud-promotional credits given to over 2 630 South African start-ups to help them become cloud-savvy and accredited.”

With a further six years of sizeable investment on the cards, it is clear that AWS still has plenty it plans to accomplish ever since spinning up data centres in SA a few years ago.

The company has also detailed the extent of the economic impact its investment has had locally to date in a report available to download (PDF) here.

You can also read the report for yourself, which is embedded below.