Governor Bob McDonnell announced that Amazon Web Services, Inc., (AWS), will expand in Fairfax County by establishing an office. AWS designs and offers cloud computing services to businesses, government and educational organizations, including web hosting, application hosting, storage and backup, content delivery, and scalable database solutions. The company plans to establish an office to support the business and mission information technology requirements for the public sector and commercial customers of AWS cloud services. The multi-million dollar project will create 500 new jobs.
Speaking about the announcement, Governor McDonnell said, "Amazon Web Services is a global, universally known company that has a significant Virginia presence as a strong corporate partner and employer. Adding a new office in Fairfax County allows the company close proximity to its IT and government customers in Virginia, and creates 500 highly technical jobs."
"AWS's continued growth throughout Virginia is a strong testament to the business climate, available workforce and cost of operations in the Commonwealth," said Jim Cheng, Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade. "We welcome the addition of the company's new IT office and a significant number of quality, high-paying jobs."
Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in over 190 countries around the world. Amazon Web Services offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.
"We look forward to putting more than 500 Virginians to work in Fairfax County," said Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector, AWS. "We appreciate the state and local elected officials who have helped us make this exciting investment in the Commonwealth of Virginia."
The Virginia Economic Development Partnership worked with the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority to secure the project for Virginia. Governor McDonnell approved a $500,000 grant from the Governor's Opportunity Fund to assist Fairfax County with the project. Through its Virginia Jobs Investment Program, the Virginia Department of Business Assistance will provide funding and services to support company recruitment and training activities.
"Fairfax County is proud to be home to such a world-class company. Amazon Web Services will be expanding and providing cloud-based services it is providing to a wide variety of clients," said Gerald L. Gordon, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. "The company will benefit from the highly skilled IT workforce that is attracted to the Fairfax area and the quality of life. It is a very important part of our corporate roster."