GYEONGJU, South Korea/Seoul (Reuters) -Amazon Web Services will invest at least $5 billion in South Korea by 2031 to build new artificial intelligence data centres, South Korea's presidential office said on Wednesday, leveraging Seoul's ambition to become an AI hub in Asia. The announcement was made during AWS Chief Executive Officer Matt Garman's meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Amazon is one of seven global firms whose executives attended the group meeting with Lee in Gyeongju, South Korea, and pledged a total of $9 billion in investments for the next five years, the presidential office said. Amazon's investment will accelerate the growth of an ecosystem for the AI industry in South Korea, as the country aims to become one of the world's top three AI leaders, Lee said at the meeting with Garman. "At AWS, we've invested and committed to investment of an additional $40 billion across 14 non-U.S. APEC countries and economies between now and 2028," Garman said. "And, that $40 billion actually drives an additional $45 billion in U.S. GDP and downstream benefit, benefiting all of the APEC economy," he said at a business event on the sidelines of the summit. AWS plans to build the new data centres on the outskirts of Seoul. AWS unveiled in June a $4 billion investment plan in South Korea as part of SK Group's investments to build the country's biggest data centre in the southeastern city of Ulsan. It has also announced investments in other countries, including Japan, Australia and Singapore. Earlier this month, South Korea's presidential office said OpenAI planned to set up joint ventures with Samsung and SK to build two data centres, a Korean-style Stargate, with an initial capacity of 20 megawatts. OpenAI said South Korea has one of the largest numbers of paying ChatGPT subscribers, second only to the United States. OpenAI also signed initial deals to source memory chips for its data centres from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. (Reporting by Heejin Kim, Jihoon Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
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