Cloud computing has fundamentally changed how we live, work, and operate. It has empowered businesses and individuals with unprecedented agility, scalability, and access to cutting-edge technologies. A decade after AWS launched the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region in Germany, we look back at how this transformation started.
From humble beginnings to powering Germany's digital future
Two decades ago, the cloud computing revolution was just taking shape, unlocking new realms of possibility. AWS's commitment to Germany over the last ten years continues to grow, from the launch of the Frankfurt Region in 2014 to powering the nation's digital transformation through sustained investments in innovative cloud services, workforce development, and sustainable practices.
"Our goal is to strengthen Hesse as a data centre location successfully, sustainably, and in the long term," says Hesse's Digital Minister, Prof. Dr. Kristina Sinemus. "The investments made by AWS strengthen Hesse as a leading digital and innovation location. We will continue to work intensively to promote the digital economy and create the necessary framework conditions to establish Hesse as a leading location for digital innovation and business."
The limitations of on-premises computing
Not long ago, many organisations were tied to on-premises infrastructure, relying on local servers and hardware. Physical limitations made it difficult to tailor compute and storage to actual business needs. This resulted in wasted resources or limited business growth. Data silos hindered collaboration and globalisation, while the traditional compute paradigm limited adaptability.
Cloud paradigm driving innovation and growth
AWS's launch in 2006 ushered in an era of on-demand, elastic, scalable, and cost-effective compute and storage. Organisations could drive innovation, increase agility, and optimise costs more effectively than on-premises. Cloud adoption has been growing rapidly since, with global spending projected to reach $805 billion by 2024 and double in size by 2028, according to IDC.
This has helped Germany emerge as a digital hub. A Telecom Advisory Services report highlights cloud computing's immense economic impact, contributing €54.66 billion to Germany's GDP in 2023 alone and creating around 316,000 new jobs.
AI's transformative potential unleashed
The last decade saw groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) developments accelerated by cloud scale, like Stable Diffusion, a generative AI model that produces unique photorealistic images from text and image prompts, unlocking new frontiers in understanding and generating human-like content. The cloud democratised access to such advanced AI capabilities. AWS has been instrumental, providing scalable infrastructure and making AI more accessible through services like Amazon SageMaker for machine learning development, AWS Inferentia for high-performance inference, and Amazon Bedrock for building and scaling generative AI applications securely and reliably.
Adidas is using Amazon Bedrock, to develop a generative AI solution that gives their engineers the ability to find information from their knowledge base through a single conversational interface, covering everything from getting started to highly technical questions.
Another example is Germany’s International University of Applied Sciences which is using AWS to automate the creation of educational videos through Amazon Bedrock. The university aims to generate 24,000 tailored learning videos by 2024 and worked with AWS to leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate video summaries from course books, create images, and produce videos incorporating text and visuals. By utilising AWS, the university implemented a modular, cost-effective AI-driven solution to transform how educational content is developed and delivered to its over 130,000 students worldwide.
Fuelling Germany's innovation agenda
Germany is among the European cloud adoption leaders, with 81% of companies leveraging cloud services, according to a recent study by the Bitkom industry association. Innovative German enterprises like BMW, Siemens, Volkswagen, and Zalando use AWS to drive transformation.
BMW leverages AWS to process over ten billion daily requests from 20 million connected vehicles across 50 countries. The automaker utilises AWS for predictive analysis, multilingual communication, and developing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). BMW runs its Cloud Data Hub on AWS, employing Amazon SageMaker for training models and predictive analytics. Additionally, BMW utilises Amazon Translate for high-quality machine translations, reducing translation time by over 75%. Furthermore, BMW has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider for its global automated driving platform, harnessing AWS compute, IoT, ML, and storage capabilities to accelerate the development of its Level 3 ADAS for next-generation vehicles.
Siemens (GAI) is integrating Amazon Bedrock into its Mendix low-code development platform to make it easy for customers to create new and modernise existing applications with generative AI. Mendix is an industry leader in low-code development with 50M end-users and more than 200,000 applications running on AWS across industrial, finance and other sectors. Mendix users in engineering and manufacturing, as well as logistics, insurance or banking industries can now create new and modernise existing apps with gen AI technology.
Zalando, an online fashion retailer with over 5,000 brands, partnered with AWS to develop an AI solution for extracting key metadata like size and colour from unstructured product descriptions. Leveraging Amazon Bedrock, the solution helps customers find desired products without excess orders and returns, reducing returns processing and lowering costs.
AWS established the Europe (Frankfurt) Region in October 2014 and has invested €9.6 billion through 2023, contributing an estimated €18.4 billion to Germany’s gross domestic product and supported an average of over 5,900 fulltime equivalent jobs annually. This includes the addition of a third Availability Zone in June 2017.
"Germany is a digital service hub, and AWS continuously invests to support our customers’ needs," said Michael Hanisch, Head of Technology AWS Germany. “AWS's growing footprint in Germany now includes 39 Amazon CloudFront edge locations, a regional edge cache in Frankfurt, embedded Points of Presence, and even extends cloud infrastructure to Germany's 5G networks with AWS Wavelength Zones in collaboration with Vodafone in Berlin, Dortmund, and Munich. This sustained investment underscores AWS's commitment to supporting Germany's innovation agenda as the nation forges ahead on its cloud transformation journey.”
Empowering the future
Looking ahead, businesses across Germany are poised to gain even greater competitive advantages through increased access to AWS's innovative cloud services and expanding regional infrastructure.
An investment of an additional €8.8 billion in expanding its existing infrastructure in the AWS European (Frankfurt) Region will help to meet increasing customer demand, especially driven by customers on their evolving AI journey.
AWS also announced an ongoing investment in Germany with the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud’s first Region will be located in Brandenburg, Germany, and is scheduled to launch by late 2025. AWS plans to invest €7.8 billion into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud by 2040 to help public sector organisations and customers in highly regulated industries meet their evolving data sovereignty needs.
Empowering local communities driving sustainability
AWS is also developing the local workforce through programmes like AWS re/Start, AWS Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance, and an apprenticeship programme in Frankfurt in collaboration with Siemens AG.
AWS InCommunities efforts include the Frankfurt Fund for non-profits and volunteering for hyperlocal projects. To inspire the next generation of tech innovators, AWS recently launched Think Big Discovery workshops. The workshops are delivered at local schools and in STEM labs in AWS Infrastructure communities where students can build robots, work on their coding skills, and learn about careers in the technology sector.
As part of its Climate Pledge, Amazon has set itself the goal of becoming carbon neutral in all its operations by 2040 – ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Renewable energy projects facilitated by Amazon in Germany include Ørsted's Borkum Riffgrund three offshore wind farm, with a planned capacity of 350 megawatts (MW) upon completion in 2025, and Iberdrola's Baltic Eagle and Windanker offshore wind farms, which are each expected to provide Amazon with 320 MW of renewable energy per year upon completion. To further underline this commitment, AWS has set itself the goal of being water-positive by 2030 and returning more water to communities than it consumes for the direct operation of its data centres.