Amazon plans €16 billion German investment in 2027, with €4.8 billion for AWS

What Amazon announced

Amazon plans to invest more than 16 billion euros in Germany in 2027, the company said on 20 October 2026 at the Invest in Germany Summit, a gathering of investors hosted by the federal government in Berlin. Reuters put the total at about $18 billion.

The package spans data centres and AI infrastructure, the Amazon Leo satellite internet network, new logistics projects, a slate of Prime Video productions and community programmes. The cloud piece is the largest named item: 4.8 billion euros to expand Amazon Web Services' Europe (Frankfurt) Region.

Amazon says it has invested more than 100 billion euros in Germany since 2010, has created more than 40,000 permanent jobs there and operates more than 100 sites. “We want German businesses, communities, and creators to have the infrastructure and tools they need to compete and grow,” said David Zapolsky, Amazon's chief global affairs and legal officer, at the summit.

4.8 billion euros for the Frankfurt cloud region

The AWS Frankfurt Region opened in October 2014. According to an AWS fact sheet published alongside the announcement, Amazon spent 9.6 billion euros on it from 2014 to 2023, which an Amazon-commissioned economic impact study estimated added 18.4 billion euros to German GDP and supported more than 5,900 jobs a year.

In 2024 Amazon committed another 8.8 billion euros to the region for 2024 to 2026, which it says it is on track to deliver by the end of this year. In total, Amazon says it has put more than 18 billion euros into AWS cloud and AI infrastructure in Frankfurt since 2014.

The new 4.8 billion euros is for 2027, which Amazon ties to strong demand from German customers for cloud and AI services. It names adidas, BMW, the Bundesliga, Siemens, Sixt and Zalando among the companies that use AWS. For a single year, 4.8 billion euros is more than the roughly 2.9 billion euros a year that the 2024 commitment works out to over its three years, by AI Lookout's arithmetic.

AWS did not say what the money buys: how many new data centres, how much power capacity, or how much is set aside for AI accelerators such as its own Trainium chips, which Amazon is trying to make easier to use with tools like TorchNeuron for PyTorch.

The sovereign cloud is a separate budget

The Frankfurt money is separate from the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which AWS launched in Brandenburg in January 2026. AWS describes it as an independent cloud for Europe, physically and logically separate from its other regions, aimed at public bodies and heavily regulated industries.

That project has its own planned budget of 7.8 billion euros from 2024 to 2040. AWS estimates it will add 17.2 billion euros to German economic output and support an average of 2,800 jobs a year over that period.

Sovereignty has become a selling point for every large US cloud provider in Europe. Microsoft set out its own approach the same day, promising to bring Foundry Local and GitHub to disconnected sovereign clouds, and European model makers such as Aleph Alpha with Kolibri pitch open models built for that kind of deployment.

A second robotics and AI lab in Berlin

The AI research piece is a second robotics and artificial intelligence lab in Berlin, which Amazon says it is opening now and which doubles its research presence in the city. The lab will hire applied scientists and robotics hardware, software and systems engineers.

Amazon says the research focuses on collaboration between people and machines in its operations, so orders arrive faster and more reliably and warehouse staff are supported. It gave no headcount or budget for the lab.

Amazon also points to its training programmes. It says the AWS Tech Alliance has reached more than 20,000 students in Germany since December 2023, and that this year it offered students at 132 universities in 18 countries, Germany among them, a free year of Kiro, its agentic AI development environment.

Satellites, warehouses and Prime Video

Much of the 16 billion euros is not about AI. Amazon Leo, its low Earth orbit satellite network, is meant to bring internet access to homes, schools, hospitals, businesses and agencies that existing networks do not reach. Amazon says it has secured 24 launches with Europe's Arianespace and cites an Oxford Economics projection that Germany will see Leo's second-largest economic impact in Europe.

In logistics, Amazon is modernising fulfilment centres in Bad Hersfeld, Dortmund and Werne by 2027, and in Koblenz, Pforzheim and Rheinberg through 2028, including with robotics. It has opened a site in Zweibrücken and is building one in Könnern. These previously announced projects account for more than 3,000 new jobs.

Prime Video plans more than 15 new German productions through the end of 2027. Amazon did not break down how the 16 billion euros divides between these areas beyond the AWS figure.

Power and water

Data centres need electricity, and Amazon addressed that directly. It says it is Germany's largest corporate buyer of carbon-free energy, with projects totalling more than 1.3 gigawatts once operational, including offshore wind farms in the North and Baltic Seas.

On water, Amazon says its German data centres use outside air for cooling about 95 percent of the time. When evaporative cooling is needed on hot days, all planned German data centres will use harvested rainwater. Amazon says it is 75 percent of the way to its goal of returning more water than its data centres use by 2030, and lists three water projects in Hesse.

These are Amazon's own figures, and they describe contracted and planned capacity rather than the additional power the 2027 expansion will draw from the grid.

Germany's AI investment push

Germany's government used the summit to court investment in AI and digital infrastructure. Katherina Reiche, the federal minister for economic affairs and energy, called Amazon's plan “a clear vote of confidence in Germany as a location for the future” and said high-performance data centres are the foundation of the digital economy.

She linked the investment to industrial AI, saying the data held by German industry gives the country the potential to lead in that field. A day earlier, the economy and research ministries signed a physical AI declaration of intent with NVIDIA, aimed at open models for German industry.

For Amazon, the timing also works commercially. Cloud providers are racing to add capacity in Europe as demand for AI services grows, and announcing a figure at a government summit puts AWS's commitment on the record next to its rivals'.

What Amazon did not say

The announcement is a plan, not a contract. Amazon says it “plans” to invest, and gave no breakdown of the 16 billion euros beyond the AWS share.

There is a small wording gap on timing. The release says the 4.8 billion euros is for 2027, while a quote from AWS executive Stefan Höchbauer in the same release describes it as planned “through 2027”. Amazon also did not say where in the Frankfurt region new capacity will be built.

The economic impact figures come from studies Amazon commissioned, not independent estimates. And analysts have started to question whether the AI build-out will pay back, with Gartner warning that trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure could face impairment by 2030.

Even so, Amazon has put a number on its 2027 plans for Germany a year in advance, and the cloud and AI share is the biggest single line in it.