Amazon Web Services (AWS) has resolved to invest an additional $35 billion in Virginia by 2040, extending its US-EAST-1 area by building multiple data centre sites throughout the state and creating 1,000 new jobs.
On January 20, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin made the announcement, expressing his delight that AWS had decided to continue expansion in the area. He issued a statement in which he stated that, “Virginia would continue to encourage the construction of this new generation of data centre campuses throughout numerous locations of the Commonwealth.”
Additionally, subject to state lawmakers’ approval, Virginia will create a new “Mega Data Centre Incentive Program” that would extend the 15-year Data Centre Sales and Use Tax exemptions on AWS-related hardware and software that could qualify the business for a special performance grant of up to $140 million for site and infrastructure upgrades, human resource development, and other project-related expenses. Amazon’s division of cloud services first established a presence in the area in 2006. AWS claimed that between 2011 and 2020 it invested $35 billion in data centres located in northern Virginia, employing about 3,500 full-time personnel in its data centres in the state. This claim was made in an Economic Impact Study that the company published in 2021.
Although US-EAST-1 is the oldest AWS region, it is likely better recognised for the disruptions it has experienced recently. The region’s unavailability in July 2022 increased the EC2 APIs’ error rates and latencies. The corporation blamed the outage on the loss of power that only affected a small portion of one data centre in the availability zone.
AWS experienced two outages in its North Virginia region six months earlier, in December 2021. These outages caused service disruptions for more than six hours, had an effect on thousands of customers, including Spotify, Southwest Airlines, and Delta, and brought down the company’s Alexa voice service and Ring security cameras. The issue was caused by network congestion between sections of the AWS Backbone and a subset of Internet Service Providers, which was triggered by AWS traffic engineering, which was carried out in response to congestion outside of our network, according to the AWS status dashboard following the incident.
AWS US-EAST-1 experienced numerous failures in September 2021, affecting AWS services like Redshift, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and RDS databases, as well as applications like Signal and the New York Times Games page.