Amazon is investing 5 billion dollars in South Korea.

South Korea's presidential office announced that Amazon Web Services will invest at least $5 billion to build new artificial intelligence data centers in the country by 2031. This investment will support Seoul's goal of becoming an artificial intelligence hub in Asia.

This announcement took place during an event on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, between AWS CEO Matt Garman and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

Amazon, one of seven global firms participating in the group meeting with Lee, committed to a total investment of $9 billion over the next five years.

Garman stated that this investment will accelerate the development of the artificial intelligence sector in South Korea, emphasizing the country's goal of becoming one of the three major artificial intelligence leaders in the world. Garman also announced that AWS plans to invest a total of $40 billion across 14 APEC countries by 2028.

Garman also mentioned that these investments would contribute an additional $45 billion to the U.S. economy.

AWS plans to build the new data centers outside of Seoul. In June, it had announced a $4 billion investment plan for South Korea, which aimed to construct the country's largest data center in the city of Ulsan in collaboration with SK Group.

Additionally, OpenAI announced earlier this month plans to establish joint ventures to create two data centers in collaboration with Samsung and SK. OpenAI noted that South Korea ranks second in the number of subscribers to ChatGPT after the U.S.. Furthermore, OpenAI signed initial memory chip procurement agreements for the data centers with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.