Larry Williams Drive

Now, we need to talk about that Amazon announcement yesterday. These guys have taken us for fools in this country. They've looked at us in New Zealand and they've gone, let's take these guys for fools. That $7.5 billion wasn't new, it was already announced by Jacinda 4 years ago. It's not even actually a convincing number, because it looks like what they've done here is included their power bills. Now power bills are not an investment, they're an operating cost. The 1000 jobs that Amazon now tells us that they're supporting also looks questionable. It looks like they've included people who already work in the electricity sector - and some say the real number is more likely a few dozen jobs. Amazon's not building anything. All the data centres they tell us are now live, have actually been built by other companies, which means that you could argue that they haven't actually added anything material to the New Zealand economy. Because if they didn't use those existing data centres, someone else wou