The unimaginable figures of the investment of Amazon Web Services in Aragon

There are times when we talk about millions of euros and large figures accompanied by numerous zeros that we even lose perspective of what they entail. The president of Aragon, Jorge Azcón , informally acknowledged something like this to the media after announcing the largest business investment in the history of the Community, an injection of 15.7 billion euros from Amazon Web Services that will arrive in Aragon in the next few years. ten years with the aim of making it the main technological hub in southern Europe.

To begin with, what do those 15.7 billion euros mean? At least, a figure practically never seen even in the rest of Europe , with the largest technological investment in the old continent. For comparison, it is almost double the Aragon Budget for 2024, and the Stellantis battery factory , another project destined to revolutionize the Community’s economy, would entail a cost (still to be confirmed) of about 4,000 million euros.

Next figure, far from trivial: the creation of 17,500 jobs throughout the country, of which 6,800 will remain in Aragon, with an impact on the technology sector and other areas of the Autonomous Community. It is true that all direct , indirect and induced jobs come here , that is, they include, for example, the workers who will be in charge of constructing the new buildings , but this still represents an incentive to the commitment to a technological sector that currently It employs 8,000 people.

All of this will have a “colossal” impact, according to Amazon, on both the national and Aragonese Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that is, the set of wealth that the territory generates in one year, with growth estimates of 21.6 billion overall. from Spain and 12.9 billion in Aragon. The latest data on regional GDP amounts to 41,750 million euros, that is, this AWS macroproject could increase it by 30% in ten years . For comparison, the Expo had an economic impact in Aragon of almost 2.6 billion and had a cost of 1.2 billion.

But not only euros have been talked about in the presentation of Amazon Web Services at the Water Tower. With the announced expansions, the electronic giant will have 400 hectares of land in the Community at its disposal . Currently, until the project came to light, it had just over 40 hectares , which means multiplying its land in Aragon by ten . In the Empresarium industrial estate in Zaragoza alone, they are going to acquire 147 hectares , about three times as many as the other data centers combined. In terms of football stadiums , which is how dimensions are traditionally spoken of, there would be 147 “Romaredas” , one after the other, all close together. Or 147 “Bernabéus”, for speaking at a national level.