Amazon's subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced at the end of February that it would invest five billion US dollars in an infrastructure cluster in Queretaro, Mexico, to offer customers advanced and secure cloud technologies. The investment in the central Mexican state, three hours' drive northwest of Mexico City, is on a par with the investment made by the US electric car manufacturer Tesla in its factory in northern Mexico.
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AWS plans to build its infrastructure region in Mexico by early 2025, the company said in a press statement. The investments are to be made over a period of 15 years. The new AWS Mexico Region will “provide developers, startups, entrepreneurs and enterprises, as well as government, education and non-profit organizations with greater choice for running their applications and serving end users through data centers in Mexico, ensuring that customers who use their “If you want to store content in Mexico, you can do so,” said AWS.
Ongoing trend: nearshoring
The announcement coincides with the global trend of companies moving their operations closer to their target markets, also known as nearshoring. Together with the USA and Canada, Mexico forms a North American free trade zone, which makes the country particularly attractive for investments with a view to the US market. Raquel Buenrostro, Mexico's economy minister, welcomed the investment. “It is a sign of confidence and shows that the right conditions are in place to support the nearshoring trend in many areas of our economy,” the AWS statement quoted her as saying. “We welcome AWS’s commitment to educating students, MSMEs and digital entrepreneurs in Mexico at scale,” the minister continued.
In April 2022, the US tech group Microsoft announced the construction of a world-class regional data center in Queretaro. From there, all Microsoft services will be provided to companies around the world. The US chip manufacturer Intel also plans to increase its presence in Latin America. The company wants to expand its semiconductor production in North and South America, with Mexico playing an important role.
Last March, Tesla also announced a mega-factory in the north in March, without giving a construction schedule or details. We are talking about an investment amount of almost five billion US dollars. But the company still hasn't started construction. Recently there were even rumors that Tesla would not build a factory in Mexico at all.
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