Amazon is investing $10 billion to create data centers in North Carolina aimed at expanding its artificial intelligence and cloud computing technology capabilities. 

The move, announced Wednesday, is its latest attempt to compete with rivals Google and Microsoft in the artificial intelligence space. It will also significantly boost its presence in the state, creating at least 500 new high-skilled jobs that range from data center engineers and network specialists, to engineering operations managers and security specialists.

"Generative AI is driving increased demand for advanced cloud infrastructure and compute power, and our investment will support the future of AI from AWS data centers in the Tar Heel State," Amazon said in a blog post on Wednesday. "This deployment of cutting-edge cloud computing infrastructure will strengthen North Carolina’s position as an innovation hub."

The investment will also support thousands of other jobs in the Amazon Web Services data center supply chain, the company said. 

Amazon has been racing to invest in its artificial intelligence infrastructure. In January, Amazon Web Services announced plans to invest an estimated $11 billion to expand its infrastructure in Georgia. Big tech companies have invested tens of billions of dollars in AI. 

In a 2024 annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said "generative AI is going to reinvent virtually every customer experience we know, and enable altogether new ones about which we’ve only fantasized." 

Leveraging this technology is one way to stay competitive, according to Jassy. 

"If your customer experiences aren’t planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive," he wrote.