Amazon’s quiet $45m write-down on its abandoned Westgate data centre exposes a gap between political talking points and the company’s actual NZ spend

Amazon’s New Zealand cloud arm has taken a roughly $45 million hit after walking away from a planned hyperscale data centre in West Auckland, newly filed accounts show — a quiet retreat that sits awkwardly beside the government’s repeated talking point that the company is pouring $7.5 billion into the country.

Financial statements for Amazon Data Services New Zealand Ltd for the year to 31 December 2025, lodged with the Companies Office and first reported by RNZ, show the subsidiary booked a $44.9 million impairment after deciding not to continue with the planned development of the site. The write-down related to land holdings, which have been reduced to a recoverable value of about $62.7 million.

The filing does not name the location, but Amazon’s only publicly disclosed greenfield development in New Zealand has been a proposed hyperscale facility in Westgate, on the city’s north-western edge. The scale of the impairment, and the reference to undeveloped land, makes it almost certain the abandoned site is the Westgate parcel.

The hit was enough to flip the local subsidiary from profit to a pre-tax loss of $36 million in 2025. The impairment was recorded inside operating expenses and accounted for the bulk of the decline.

The decision marks a striking change of course from the announcement made in late 2021, when Amazon Web Services said it would build a region of New Zealand-based data centres at a cost of around $7.5 billion over 15 years. At the time the company said the project would create 1,000 direct and indirect jobs and add roughly $10.8 billion to the New Zealand economy. Then-Minister for the Digital Economy and Communications David Clark called it a vote of confidence in the country’s recovery from the pandemic, and Melissa Lee, then the National Party’s digital economy spokesperson, said it would encourage young people to pursue careers in tech.

The economics of building a single greenfield campus appear to have changed faster than the political messaging around them. Construction costs have climbed, the New Zealand power market has tightened as the Maui field winds down, and global hyperscalers including Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all moved towards leasing space inside existing wholesale data centres rather than ground-up construction in smaller markets. The accounts filed in Wellington this week show that shift in unusually clear numbers.

Between December 2024 and December 2025, the value of equipment on Amazon’s New Zealand books surged to more than $250 million, up from about $5 million a year earlier. Lease assets climbed to roughly $285 million from $244 million, with a further $162 million in future lease commitments yet to begin. Assets under construction, by contrast, dropped to zero. In other words, every dollar that might once have been earmarked for digging foundations in Westgate has been redirected into servers, networking gear and floor space rented from other operators.

That looks much less like a retreat from New Zealand than a change of model. Total assets in the local subsidiary still sit above $650 million, and Amazon has been a heavy customer of the wholesale data centre operators expanding around Auckland — including CDC, NEXTDC and Spark’s CSL Datacom arm — all of which are running multi-year build programmes of their own. The capacity is still arriving, it is just no longer being delivered through Amazon’s own balance sheet.

Where the gap opens up is between Wellington’s headline figures and what the published accounts actually contain. The Prime Minister has repeatedly cited the $7.5 billion number when promoting foreign investment in New Zealand, most recently during the trade mission to India earlier this year. That total was the four-year-old commitment Amazon made in 2021, before the Westgate plan was shelved. Whether the company still intends to spend that full sum here, and on what footprint, has not been restated publicly.

The 2021 announcement also leaned heavily on a forecast of 1,000 direct and indirect jobs. Direct construction headcount on a hyperscale campus typically peaks during the build, then drops sharply once the facility is automated and operational. Walking away from the West Auckland build means the construction-phase jobs that would have come with it will not materialise on that site. A leased fit-out inside someone else’s building creates far fewer roles than a greenfield campus.

There are second-order questions for Auckland Council and Eke Panuku as well. Westgate has been positioned for years as a high-value commercial growth node, with infrastructure spend justified in part by the prospect of large foreign-owned tenants like Amazon. The land remains in Amazon’s hands, valued at about $62.7 million on its books, but it now sits without a development pathway attached.

For New Zealand’s wider tech sector the practical impact may be muted. The cloud capacity that businesses, banks and government agencies are migrating to is still being delivered, just by a different cast of operators in different buildings. The reputational message, however, is harder to spin. New Zealand sold itself in 2021 as a country where a global hyperscaler wanted to build from scratch. In 2026 it has become a country where the same hyperscaler would rather rent.

RNZ’s full report on the impairment is here, and the underlying accounts can be looked up via the Companies Register.

What do you make of Amazon quietly stepping back from the Westgate build? Is the lease-and-equip pivot still a win for New Zealand, or has the political talking point outlived the underlying commitment? Drop a comment below and tell us what you think.