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Amazon Web Services plans to spend $10 billion in Ohio, creating jobs and a huge energy demand

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (Statehouse News Bureau) — Amazon Web Services will invest $10 billion to expand its data centers across Ohio. The company says it plans to spend more than $23 billion in Ohio by the end of 2030. The state said it will create hundreds of jobs, but the industry’s growth in Ohio has also sparked some concern because of its demand for energy.

An Amazon company logo on the company's building in Schoenefeld near Berlin, Germany, March 18, 2022
[Michael Sohn | AP]
The announcement from Amazon Web Services makes it the second-largest planned investment in Ohio ever by a private company, behind Intel’s manufacturing facility. Its announcement in June 2023 that it plans to spend $7.8 billion by 2029 to expand its data center operations in central Ohio held that spot as the second-largest planned investment in Ohio history till now.

“Ohio is the third largest data center state in the country,” said Lt. Gov. Jon Husted in an interview. “We’re probably going to see, over the course of a decade, $100 billion of capital investment in Ohio on data centers, which is going to require tens of billions of dollars in investment in energy transmission and generation, which is also capital expenditure that will help lift up the Ohio economy and create jobs.”

But that demand for energy has had electric utilities worried for a while.

Data centers have driven up the energy load in central Ohio this year to six times what it was in 2020, and it’s expected to increase sevenfold by 2030.

An agreement still pending approval by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio would require new large data centers to pay for at least 85% of their estimated energy needs – whether they use it or not – to cover infrastructure costs for AEP, the utility that serves the central Ohio area. A hearing on that agreement is set for January.