Matt Garman

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is among the world’s largest data center companies and users. Matt Garman has headed this cloud unit within the e-commerce hegemon since June 2024.

It was large then, and has grown since. A month after Garman’s promotion, AWS paid $135.8 million for a 33-acre data center campus in Northern Virginia. A couple of months later, the company made known its plans to occupy a 60-acre data center complex in the same region.

Both moves were apparently part of AWS’s plan to invest $35 billion more in Northern Virginia data centers by 2040. The company’s first data center investment in the region was in 2006 — the year Garman joined AWS. In fact, he helped launch the company’s initial cloud systems, and most recently worked as its senior vice president of sales, marketing and global services.

There were major plays outside of Northern Virginia, too. Like the additional $10 billion that AWS announced in December it would invest in Ohio data centers by 2031. Or the $227 million in cash that AWS reportedly paid last fall for a 220-acre site in Arizona’s Maricopa County. It’s most likely for a data center as the company moves beyond the asset class’ historical national hub of Northern Virginia. 

As it stands, the AWS that Garman leads accounts for around 30 percent of the $330 billion global public cloud services market, well ahead of other comers like Microsoft and Google, according to consultancy Synergy Research Group. That market stood at around $20 billion 10 years ago. Driving the growth is generative artificial intelligence. And — surprise! — Garman and company are all in on the technology’s potential for data centers and other real estate.

“It is such a foundational technology,” Garman told the Wall Street Journal toward the end of last year. “It’s just a thing that’s going to happen forever.” 

In fact, late April 2025 reports that AWS was perhaps pausing some data center deals — it’s still unclear how many and to what extent — touched off speculation about a data center bust in the U.S.