Adam Selipsky.
Adam Selipsky
CEO at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Data is eating the world and data centers are feeding on real estate. Just ask the folks at Amazon Web Services (AWS), led by Adam Selipsky.
AWS’s hunger for physical space to support its cloud computing platform continues to grow, making it No. 1 on Data Centre Magazine’s Top 100 data center companies list in October 2023. And, with the enormous capital behind parent company Amazon, AWS should continue to be a data center monster.
In March 2024, Amazon announced plans to spend some $150 billion over the next 15 years on data centers. The investment gives the cloud-computing giant a sky-high head start in handling an expected surge in the demand for artificial intelligence and other digital growth.
As part of Amazon’s investment strategy, in January 2024 the company announced that it was investing $10 billion — as in “billion” with a “b” — in two Mississippi AWS data center complexes. That expansion plan announcement came days after AWS said it was investing more than $15 billion in cloud computing infrastructure in Japan.
Selipsky is now not only commanding AWS’s massive technology platform, but also a fast-growing data center empire that has begun to dwarf its parent company’s traditional commercial real estate footprint.
The AWS data center expansion shows no signs of flagging, as the firm battles Google and Microsoft in the cloud-computing market, and is trying to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT by introducing its own artificial intelligence products such as Bedrock, which builds on foundation models, and Q, a chatbot for business that uses generative AI.
To support that AI growth and customer demand for it and other data products, in August 2023 Selipsky told The Verge: “I think building out [the] whole chip supply chain and then building out power and data center capacity in places around the world, inside the U.S. as well as other countries where it really makes sense, where you really have runway, is going to be key to our providing the supply that all of these customers … are indeed demanding.”
