Amazon Web Services (AWS) operated a total of 48.927 million square feet (4.55m sqm) of data center and office space in 2024.

The company owned some 24.052 million sq ft (2.2m sqm) and leased another 24.875m sq ft (2.3m sqm), it revealed in its 10-K filing.

The combined figure represents a 28 percent increase over 2023. That year was a 14 percent increase over 2022, while 2022 was 28 percent over 2021.

2021 was the largest percentage yearly increase in footprint since the company began reporting, with a 44 percent jump over 2020's 18.1m sq ft.

The filing does not disclose how much of the 48.9m sq ft is actually data center white space, rather than all the other additional parts of data center, sales, and other property. It does not, however, include corporate facilities or headquarters.

The company currently operates 114 Availability Zones across 36 geographic regions, with plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

At the same time as its data center footprint has grown larger, the capacity it represents will have grown at a faster rate - as racks get ever denser with AI. The company is currently expanding the retrofit team that aims to "modernize and improve our extensive data center fleet," job listings reveal.

This week, Amazon said that it would spend some $100 billion on capex this year, up from $83bn. That also includes its e-commerce and office costs, but the majority is expected to go to data centers, chips, and networking.

The faster we grow, the more capex we end up spending because we have to procure data center and hardware and chips and networking gear ahead of when we're able to monetize it," CEO Andy Jassy said. "We don't procure it unless we see significant signals of demand.”