Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud vendor, is likely planning to expand its infrastructure footprint in California.
Documents discovered by Silicon Valley Business Journal reveal that the company purchased 56 acres of land within Gilroy city limits, 30 miles southeast of San Jose, operating through a subsidiary – the same subsidiary it used to purchase swathes of land in Northern Virginia, the world’s most important data center hub.
Hyperscalers often use aliases during business negotiations to obscure their involvement – but the measure isn’t as effective as it once was. For example, Facebook’s involvement in a giant data center in Nashville was revealed in January, six months before the company made an official statement on the matter.
Speculation
The existence of the deal was revealed in a Santa Clara County deed filed last week. AWS is thought to have paid $31.28 million for the plot in Gilroy.
It’s important to note that the area doesn’t even have a fixed address yet – Amazon’s potential neighbors include the Gilroy Premium Outlets shopping center, See Grins RV and the Gilroy Unified School District offices. The area is zoned “general industrial.”
Amazon runs an extensive data center network in California, supporting its ‘us-west-1’ region. Each AWS region is designed to be isolated from the others, and comprises multiple availability zones - each powered in a separate data center location. The exact details of these locations are often kept secret.
Back in 2018, information published by Wikileaks suggested that in California, much of the company’s cloud infrastructure was hosted with third-party data center operators including Equinix, Coresite, and Digital Realty.
While signs indeed point to AWS earmarking the land for a data center, the company’s actual plans for the property are unknown. Last year, Google acquired a nearly 40-acre plot of land in Gilroy; Gilroy Dispatch later found that the land will be used as a tree nursery to provide foliage for its office campuses in the Bay Area.
