Amazon Plans to Invest $1.29 Billion in French Tech Projects

Amazon is reportedly set to invest nearly $1.3 billion on tech projects in France.

The eCommerce giant is one of several global companies poised to announce new foreign investments in France this week, Bloomberg News reported Sunday (May 12).

French President Emmanuel Macron will host 180 CEOs and executives at the Château de Versailles on Monday (May 13) for the country’s seventh annual “Choose France” summit, part of the government’s campaign to make France into a financial hub for Europe.

Overall investments will exceed last year’s total of $14 billion, the report said, citing a statement by the Macron administration.

Amazon’s $1.29 billion investments will include projects to bolster its logistics and increasing computing capacities, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) efforts in its cloud division AWS, resulting in around 3,000 new jobs.

Other companies taking part in the summit include Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Morgan Stanley, the report said.

The investment comes on the heels of Amazon’s latest earnings report, which showed that AI was a key driver of growth in the company’s most recent quarter, as it unveiled several new generative AI (GenAI) products and services.

“The most notable among these was Amazon Q, a GenAI-powered assistant that accelerates software development and leverages companies’ internal data,” PYMNTS wrote. “Amazon also introduced Bedrock, a fully managed AI service that enables customers to build and deploy AI applications quickly.”

Amazon continued to expand its collaborations with top AI companies, among them Anthropic, Meta and Nvidia, to bolster its AI offerings, that report said.

And in the face of increased competition from rivals such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, AWS demonstrated signs of a comeback in the first quarter 2024. The division’s sales rose 17% year over year to $25 billion, while its operating income climbed to $9.4 billion, compared to $5.1 billion in the first quarter of last year.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS last week examined the company’s increased use of AI to combat fraudulent reviews, an essential effort to keep consumers who depend on these evaluations for purchasing decisions and businesses that need genuine customer feedback.

Andrew Sellers, head of technology strategy at Confluent, told PYMNTS that “AI can build highly granular models for assessing fraud risk that incorporate many features of end customer behavior such as transaction time, amount, location and purchase/claim history.”

These models, he added, can be based on rules set by experts or patterns learned by machines using transaction data.

“Doing this kind of analysis at scale is only possible with automation,” Sellers said.

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