Through discussions with Italy's largest utility company Enel, Amazon is reportedly looking at three to five sites in northern Italy, specifically plants in the Piedmont region and in the area of Piacenza, a city which is in close proximity to the company's main Italian distribution centre with 1,000 employees.
Amazon is reportedly willing to expense up to €1B on the conversions. The company has invested €450m in Italy since 2010 and maintains a total workforce of 1,700 there. A substantial storage and logistics facility to be built in Rome was announced in July. Other European infrastructure initiatives of late involve planned data centres in France and London, as well as investments in Ireland and Germany. External of Europe, forthcoming AWS regions are set for Montreal and Ningxia.
As demand for virtual cloud services rises, so too do physical infrastructure requirements. Watchers are looking for expenses to continue ramping at Amazon and other cloud contenders as the heightened demand has also consequently tightened competition across the space.