Amazon plans to invest more than €16 billion (about $18 billion) in Germany in 2027, the company announced on Tuesday at the Invest in Germany Summit in Berlin. The package spans data centres and AI infrastructure, the Amazon Leo satellite network, logistics projects and a new Prime Video production slate, and it builds on more than €100 billion Amazon says it has invested in the country since 2010.
The centrepiece for the cloud business is a €4.8 billion expansion of the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region. Amazon says the money is meant to keep pace with demand for advanced cloud and AI services from German companies, and it sits alongside a second robotics and artificial intelligence research lab that the company is now opening in Berlin.
Amazon’s €16 Billion Germany Package: Where The Money Goes
Amazon announced the investment on October 20 at the federal government’s Invest in Germany Summit, where its chief global affairs and legal officer, David Zapolsky, appeared alongside Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “Germany is a hub of innovation and one of the most attractive investment opportunities in Europe,” Zapolsky said. “That is why we have invested more than €100 billion here since 2010, and why we plan to invest an additional €16 billion in 2027.”
Beyond the cloud, the package covers logistics projects that account for more than 3,000 new jobs, development of the Amazon Leo satellite broadband network — which has secured 24 launches with the European provider Arianespace — and more than 15 new Prime Video productions in Germany through the end of 2027. Amazon says it has already created over 40,000 permanent jobs across more than 100 sites in the country, including 3,000 AWS employees, according to its Germany country manager, Rocco Bräuniger.
AWS Frankfurt Expansion And The €4.8 Billion AI Infrastructure Share
Of the total, €4.8 billion is earmarked through 2027 to expand the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region, which first launched in October 2014 and now sits next to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany, generally available since January 2026. Stefan Höchbauer, AWS vice president of global sales for Germany and Europe Central, said companies “need infrastructure they can rely on — secure, available, and built to help them stay ahead,” and that the Frankfurt expansion is how AWS intends to keep supplying it.
The Berlin lab doubles Amazon’s research presence in the capital. Its work focuses on intelligent collaboration between people and warehouse technology, with new roles for applied scientists and robotics hardware, software and systems engineers — the same robotics and AI line Amazon has been pushing through its operations stack, most recently with TorchNeuron, which lets PyTorch code run unmodified on its Trainium chips.
The Summit Context: Amazon, Nvidia And A €225 Billion Pledge Day
Amazon’s announcement was one of the largest made at the inaugural summit. Reuters reported that companies pledged more than €225 billion in total at the event, and the same stage carried Nvidia’s industrial AI partnership with Germany, including backing for four German startups. Federal minister for economic affairs and energy Katherina Reiche called Amazon’s commitment “a clear vote of confidence in Germany as a location for the future,” adding that high-performance data centres are “the foundation of the digital economy” and that Germany’s industrial data gives it the potential to become a global leader in industrial AI.
The 2027 package follows the €10 billion investment Amazon announced in June 2024, which included €8.8 billion for AWS data centres. It also leans on programmes already running in the country, from the AWS Tech Alliance, which Amazon says has reached more than 20,000 students since December 2023, to a free year of its Kiro agentic AI development environment for students at German universities — part of the wider Amazon AI stack of Alexa+, Bedrock and Nova that the Frankfurt capacity ultimately serves, including Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s model marketplace.
Why It Matters
What matters most in Amazon’s German investment is not the headline €16 billion but the €4.8 billion directed at one cloud region. Frankfurt is where European customers who need data residency, sovereign-cloud controls and low-latency AI inference actually buy capacity, so expanding it strengthens AWS against Microsoft’s and Google’s European regions at the moment every hyperscaler is racing to land AI workloads on the continent. The neighbours feel it too: German manufacturers gain local capacity for the industrial AI both Berlin and Nvidia are promoting, Amazon Leo’s German supply chain gains launch and manufacturing work through Arianespace partners, and the Berlin robotics lab ties the country’s research base directly into Amazon’s logistics automation. For rivals, a single-year commitment of this size raises the cost of competing in Europe’s largest economy.
Background
Amazon launched its Frankfurt cloud region in 2014 and has since made Germany one of its largest markets outside the United States, passing €100 billion in cumulative investment since 2010 across logistics, cloud and media. Its June 2024 package put €10 billion into cloud infrastructure and logistics, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud — a separate, EU-operated cloud built for regulated industries and governments — became generally available in January 2026, setting up the Frankfurt expansion announced this week as the next step in that build-out.
Source: Amazon (official announcement, Oct 20); Reuters (Oct 20)
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