AWS preps S$12 billion to double its cloud in Singapore
AWS today announced it will invest SG$12B (US$8.8B) in Singapore. What does it really mean?
AWS today announced it will invest SG$12B (US$8.8B) in Singapore. What does it really mean?
You might have read the headlines about Amazon investing $12 billion into cloud and AI in Singapore over the next 4 years.
The announcement was made at the AWS Summit this morning. Here's the low-down from my perspective.
- It's a lot of money
First off, $12 billion is a lot of money. And this investment will double AWS' investment in Singapore.
To put this into context, AWS launched its cloud here in 2010, building up its cloud over 14 years. In 4 years, AWS now plans to double this infrastructure.
And remember, Singapore served the cloud needs of the entire SEA for a decade with this initial investment. Today, there's AWS Jakarta (2021) and AWS Malaysia (Planned 2024).
Of course, the vast majority of this amount will go toward equipment purchases from overseas, not local businesses. But there's that cool billion dollars in GST at 9% for the government.
- My bet is on GPUs
So what will AWS be investing in? My bet is that a lot of these funds will go towards purchasing GPUs for its data centres here.
Assuming 50,000 H100 GPUs at US$40K per unit, that's a couple of billion USD already, and we haven't even counted the servers and other IT gear needed to host them.
One way to track this is by monitoring GPU instances available in Singapore; AWS Singapore region currently supports only the P3 instances which tops off at a mere 8GPUs. P4d goes up to "thousands" and P5 to 20,000 H100s.
Did you know: AI Singapore's SEA-LION large-language model was trained with A100 GPUs on AWS? As I understand it, they were struggling to get access due to the shortage of GPUs before AWS made some available (It was paid for).
(Read "Made in Singapore: The story behind the SEA-LION LLM" here)
- Negligible employment impact
Sadly, the huge investment doesn't necessarily mean more jobs in Singapore, and AWS sidestepped the question when asked by the Straits Times (ST).
How many does AWS hire here anyway? A statement by Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information Tan Kiat How gave the answer.
From today's ST report: "... Amazon hires more than 2,000 workers, many of whom are Singaporeans or permanent residents."
As Mr Tan used "many" not "majority" (Which means > 50%), I'll infer that 1,000 or less are Singaporeans or PR.
Despite talk of hybrid cloud gaining traction, it would appear that AWS is bullish on the use of its cloud in the region.
