Overseas Mega Cloud Providers Seek to Have Govt Red Tape Cleared and Other Benefits Not Available to NZ Providers
December 25, 2022
PHOTO: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Mega-company Amazon asked Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for help over billion-dollar data centres it is building here, and to have input on policy.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) asked Jacinda Ardern to appoint an “empowered” minister or senior officials to collaborate on getting an Overseas Investment Office consent without delays and to discuss bringing in skilled IT workers from abroad, among other things, an Official Information Act (OIA) response shows.
AWS also said: “We would very much like to discuss opportunities we see for fine-tuning New Zealand’s policy settings that can support public sector cloud technology enablement”, including how Amazon could meet the requirements to host highly classified data.
The 39-page OIA contains correspondence between Ardern, her office, and several of the dozen data centre companies that previously released documents show have been asking for government support - and asking ministers to cut the red tape on their various data centre construction projects in Auckland and the South Island.
Read the complete OIA here (39 pages)
The two largest global players, AWS and Microsoft, are to the forefront of the correspondence.
But the letters and e-mails also include one from a small local cloud computing company, Catalyst, asking in June 2022 if Ardern could visit (“We don’t own superyachts, private jets, or spacecraft,” it emailed her, trying to set itself apart). She did not visit, Catalyst told RNZ.