Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to spend more than $2.3 billion in the next two years building and operating data centers in the United Kingdom.

AWS is making the investment to meet the growing needs of its customers and to help strengthen the U.K.’s digital infrastructure. This will bring AWS’s total investment there to more than double what it is today. It launched the AWS London region more than five years ago.

Darren Hardman is vice president and general manager of AWS in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

AWS’ Darren Hardman

“We are proud of the contributions we are making to the U.K. economy,” he said. “Looking ahead, we know that the U.K. remains full of opportunity. And we continue to be excited by the potential to continue supporting our customers, partners and citizens across the U.K. over the years to come.”

UK Organizations Heavily Using AWS

Organizations of all sizes and across all industries in the United Kingdom are using AWS, the company said. That includes fast-growing startups, SMBs, the largest enterprises, public sector organizations, educational institutions and government agencies.

There are also thousands of businesses in the United Kingdom registered as AWS Partner Network (APN) partners across the country. APN is an international program that connects AWS suppliers with new customers.

To help accelerate adoption of cloud computing in the public sector, AWS signed an agreement with the U.K. government. This will help improve digital skills across the civil service. Moreover, it will help SMEs to take part in public sector contracts, AWS said. As part of this agreement, AWS established a new digital skills fund. It will train over 6,000 civil servants in cloud computing.

As a whole, Amazon has invested nearly $42 billion in its U.K. operations since 2010.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced it created a further 25,000 permanent roles across the region in 2021. That includes jobs in a variety of corporate and R&D functions in Amazon and AWS, as well as its operations teams in its fulfilment centers, sort centers and delivery stations. Its total permanent workforce now exceeds 70,000 in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge.

Google Cloud, VMware Expand Partnership

In other cloud news, Google Cloud and VMware have expanded their partnership to help customers accelerate app modernization and cloud transformation. Customers can now use the VMware Cloud Universal program to take advantage of Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Through this extended partnership, enterprise customers will get greater financial flexibility, choice and the ability to accelerate their cloud migrations and modernize their enterprise applications in Google Cloud.

Google Cloud VMware Engine allows customers to migrate VMware applications to the cloud without changes to applications, tools or processes. The VMware Cloud Verified and native Google Cloud service provides enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for vSphere workloads with security capabilities, availability, resource optimization, manageability and operational support built into the core service.

Once in the cloud, customers can create hybrid applications that allow their businesses to be more agile. They also have more secure access to Google services like BigQuery and cloud operations.

In addition, they’ll extend their existing disaster recovery, backup and storage services.

Google Cloud’s Kevin Ichhpurani

Kevin Ichhpurani is Google Cloud‘s corporate vice president of global ecosystem.

“This announcement brings VMware and Google Cloud closer together, and represents a significant step forward in our joint commitment to support businesses’ digital transformations with Google Cloud VMware Engine,” he said.