Tokyo: Amazon Web Services Inc., the cloud computing unit of Amazon.com Inc., said Friday that it will invest 14.96 billion dollars in Japan over the next five years through 2027.

With the investment, AWS plans to strengthen its data centers in the country’s two largest urban areas around Tokyo and the western city of Osaka.

“We see Japan as a very important country,” Tadao Nagasaki, head of the Japan unit of AWS, told a press conference.

The move comes as demand for data centers is growing in Japan, driven by the rapidly spreading use of artificial intelligence tools that automatically generate text and images.

In the 12 years through 2022, AWS invested a total of 10 billion dollars in the Asian country.

JIJI Press