Amazon's own retail business is being de-concentrated out of Northern Virginia and Dublin

Amazon's e-commerce business is running a multiyear program, known internally as "Region Flex," to reduce its concentration in a handful of large AWS regions and instead run systems across more locations at smaller scale, according to internal planning documents obtained by Business Insider ^[1]. Those plans include shrinking the retail footprint in major AWS hubs including Northern Virginia and Dublin ^[2], which turns the power crunch from a vendor supply story into an architecture requirement that lands on customers.

The documents explicitly cite power and capacity constraints in cloud planning for the retail business ^[3]. One planning document from last year said online retail teams were investing in moving infrastructure out of the Dublin region "to mitigate expansion risk due to AWS power constraints" ^[4]. A grocery team document said Region Flex was required to ensure Amazon could meet "projected capacity requirements in each region" ^[5]. The logistics organisation described the work as dividing its "service architecture footprint" so it could run "in more AWS regions at a smaller scale, in closer proximity to our customers" ^[6]. Business Insider reports the project may not have begun because of the AI-driven power squeeze, but that the documents show this has become the driving force ^[7].

This is not a side project. Amazon's grocery business called Region Flex an "S-Team goal," a reference to the senior leadership team, and said teams were planning more than 100 software migrations ^[8]. The documents also frame it as improving resilience during AWS disruptions ^[9].

The context is a market with no slack. Vacancy across North America's largest data centre markets fell to a record 1.4% at the end of 2025, according to CBRE ^[10], and limited power is pushing new capacity out of established hubs into smaller markets where electricity can be secured faster ^[11]. Amazon said in October it had added more than 3.8 gigawatts of data centre capacity over the prior year, doubling its cloud scale since 2022, and expects to roughly double power capacity again by the end of 2027 ^[12]. Even so, CEO Andy Jassy said last month that AWS still cannot build capacity fast enough to meet demand ^[13].

De-concentration has a bill. The documents show workloads leaving Dublin and spreading to regions including Frankfurt and Zaragoza, Spain ^[14], and one document put the infrastructure cost increase for some of those services at 10% to 15% ^[15]. On timing, an internal plan last year called for cutting the e-commerce footprint in Dublin by 40% during 2025, contemplated leaving Dublin entirely by the end of 2026, and leaving Northern Virginia and Oregon by 2029 ^[16] - which would mean clearing the remaining roughly 60% of Dublin in about a year ^[17]. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed Region Flex to Business Insider but said official internal documents do not always reflect current plans and described some of the timelines and details as "not accurate" ^[18], adding that "Evolving our infrastructure is nothing new" ^[19] and that using more regions improves flexibility, reliability, cost management and proximity to customers ^[20].

Read the spokesperson's framing next to the planning language and the direction is the same. The plausible reading for any tenant: if the retail business inside the same company is being moved out of the biggest hubs to secure headroom, a capacity request in Northern Virginia from an outside customer is unlikely to be treated more generously.