Amazon cloud centre boosts Victorian economy

Tech giant Amazon has chosen Melbourne for an investment it says is likely to contribute billions of dollars to the Victorian economy over the next 10 years.

AWS head of technology and translation for ANZ, Simon Elisha (left) and XY Sense CEO and co-founder Alex Birch, an Amazon customer. Picture: Aaron Francis

US tech giant Amazon has chosen Melbourne for a new AWS cloud infrastructure region, an investment it says would be likely to contribute billions of dollars to the Victorian economy over the next 10 years as the state moves to recover from the devastating coronavirus pandemic.

The company’s Melbourne data centre will open in the second half of 2022 and create 90 jobs in the immediate future, joining its existing Sydney region — launched in 2012 — and eight regions across the Asia-Pacific.

Amazon said on Tuesday it had invested $3bn into Australia over the past decade, a number that is set to skyrocket as businesses across the country complete digital transformations and shift their workloads to the cloud.

AWS has hundreds of thousands of customers locally, including CBA, Woodside, David Jones, NAB, Telstra, Qantas, Atlassian and Canva, and a second local AWS region would mean higher speeds and greater resiliency for those companies.

“A second region in Australia will give AWS customers the ability to build applications with greater fault tolerance resiliency, and even reduce latency for critical cloud workloads,” Amazon Web Services local managing director Adam Beavis said.

“The new AWS Melbourne region will provide us with the opportunity to continue to create further jobs in Australia, including the new data centre operators and technical engineers. We’re passionate about improving skills of the local developers and students and supporting the next generation of IT leaders.”

Terms of any arrangement with the Victorian government were not disclosed. Economic Development Minister Tim Pallas said the investment was proof the state was “not sitting back” when it came to bouncing back from COVID-19.

“This new AWS region will draw on our highly skilled people and renowned capabilities in growing employment fields such as cloud computing. Attracting companies like AWS will strengthen our reputation as a tech leader, create Victorian jobs and help drive our economic recovery,” Mr Pallas said.

Alex Birch, co-founder of Internet of Things start-up XY Sense, said his company was expanding in Melbourne and was turning to AWS to ramp up its big data infrastructure.

“They help us cost-effectively process almost 5 billion anonymous data points in office buildings across Australia,” he said.

“AWS is a must-have for start-ups and a second local region will be a powerful launch pad for other budding entrepreneurs in the Victorian start-up community. This announcement means exciting things for the tech ecosystem here in Australia.”

In September 2019 AWS pledged net zero carbon output by 2040, and has announced two new Australian renewable energy projects to help it achieve its goal.

“Globally we have a goal to draw 100 per cent of our energy needs from renewable resources by 2030 and we’re on the path to do that by 2025,” Mr Beavis said.

“In total, (the projects) will combine 165MW of capacity, enough to power 63,000 average Australian homes each year.”