New details: Amazon Web Services confirms Fayette County plans

Attendees pass an AWS logo at AWS re:Invent 2024, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, on Dec. 2, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Noah Berger/Amazon Web Services via AP Images)

Credit: AWS

Credit: AWS

Attendees pass an AWS logo at AWS re:Invent 2024, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, on Dec. 2, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Noah Berger/Amazon Web Services via AP Images)

Responding to inquiries from this newspaper, an Amazon executive has confirmed Amazon Web Services’ plans for a data center in Fayette County, about an hour’s drive from Montgomery County.

“Fayette County is the first site outside of Central Ohio where AWS plans to establish new data centers, investing an estimated $5 billion by 2030,” Roger Wehner, vice president of economic development at AWS (Amazon Web Services), said in an email to a Dayton Daily News reporter. “As AWS continues to invest in Ohio, we are grateful to the local leadership in Fayette County who support our ability to grow and innovate on behalf of our customers. We look forward to leveraging our strong public and private partnerships to extend the impact of our investment across the state, and bring new educational and workforce opportunities to the next generation of tech talent.”

A spokeswoman for AWS said construction is expected to begin in early 2025. Beyond that, should could not offer a timeline for the project.

“AWS is expected to generate more than a hundred jobs in Fayette County by 2030,” said the spokeswoman, Virginia Milazzo.

The statement came Tuesday, more than a month after an Amazon spokeswoman told this newspaper that Amazon was considering a data center in Fayette County, about 25 miles east of Xenia.

“We recently filed documents as part of the process in exploring possible data center locations. This is part of our normal due diligence process as we are constantly evaluating new locations based on customer demand,” Milazzo told the Dayton Daily News then.

Torrie Griggs, Boardman Chamber of Commerce CEO, gives a tour of the AWS Think Big Space at the Sage Center on Friday, Aug. 23, 2024, in Boardman, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

Credit: AP

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Credit: AP

This news outlet last month first reported that a new Amazon data center near Jeffersonville was possible after a reporter reviewed documents filed earlier this month by the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel (OCC) with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Earlier this month, the administration of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said AWS would invest an estimated $10 billion to expand its data center infrastructure across Ohio, creating hundreds of jobs by the end of 2030.

At the time, a center in Fayette County was not confirmed.

The new data centers will host computer servers, data storage drives, networking equipment, and other technology to power cloud computing, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, Ohio government said.

The additional investment in Ohio builds on the $7.8 billion announced by AWS last year, which was in addition to the more than $6 billion already invested through 2022, bringing the company’s announced investment in Ohio since 2015 to more than $23 billion by the end of 2030, the DeWine administration said.

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