AWS said on Tuesday that it would invest £8 billion (about US$10.4 billion) in UK data centers over the next five years, in response to the soaring demand for cloud access.

This seems to place rivals Microsoft and Google at about the same investment level in the cloud infrastructure UK as AWS.

According to the AWS announcement, the funds will be used to construct, run, and maintain data centers in the UK. According to AWS, these occupations, which also include jobs in engineering, telecommunications, construction, facility maintenance, and other sectors of the local economy, are all part of the AWS data center supply chain.

It is impossible to determine exactly what this investment will buy because AWS does not break down the investment in terms of workers, contractors, hardware, software, and other products. In the past, Google and Microsoft have also been evasive regarding their cloud budgets in Europe.

A UK-based AWS manager, who wished to remain anonymous, affirmed that funds allocated for the AWS UK investment will remain undisclosed. 

She informed reporters via email that both capital and operating expenses (opex) would be part of the proposed investment. They defined opex as things like rent, power, and network utilities, and capex as the building of data centers, the acquisition of servers and server racks, and networking equipment. She went on to say that she couldn't give a breakdown.

British data sovereignty laws, which mandate that a large portion of data storage take place within its borders, are one of the main forces supporting the investment.