Amazon Web Services: Data Center Economics

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

Can you give me a split of $1 billion, how much is building and land?

30% or $300 million would be for the building itself, for the grading, pad, cement floor, pipes, walls and ceiling. In addition to that, you have MEP, which is mechanical, electrical and plumbing infrastructure. That accounts for another 40% or $400 million. The remaining $300 million is for networking cables, cable infrastructure and trays, the power cabling which will get run through.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

That land expense is depreciated and makes up a third of that investment?

Yes, that's part of the startup investment. Strategically, we're making the decision we are going to incur most of our growth in the US in those three regions. That will handle 75% of all of our computing because they're enormous regions. We do have other regions such as Montreal, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco which are in metro areas, where we need a presence, and in those cases, we acquire land for expansion on demand. If we know in two years we will start building another data center in Montreal, a team will search for favorable land contracts.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

The capex figures were $13 billion in 2019, $16.5 billion in 2020 and $22 billion in 2021, so if net additions to PP&E at AWS was $1 billion, that's 22 hyperscale data centers you built in one year?

No. We only build three hyperscale data centers per region. There will be three in Virginia, three in Columbus and three in Oregon. That makes nine, plus you might have several others, so yearly you may have a dozen data centers in flight.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.