PM Christopher Luxon at the Amazon Web Services launch in Auckland on Tuesday. Photo: Three News / Stuff
"You're off to Amazon. Is there a headline out of that today?" Mike Hosking asked Christopher Luxon on his Newstalk ZB show on Tuesday morning.
The headlines followed almost immediately - and well before the PM had even arrived at Amazon Web Services' new Auckland data centre.
"It's an incredible story. They're investing $7.5b in New Zealand and creating up to about one thousand jobs - and it's about almost an $11 billion boost to our GDP," the PM told Mike Hosking.
"Have you told them we haven't got the power to run it?" Hosking replied with tongue-in-cheek, drawing nervous laughter from the PM.
The question of power use and the impact it could have on supply was no joke, as it turned out.
But Mike Hosking was impressed.
"That's a good news day all round - and a bit of an exclusive, as far as I can work out," he told his listeners.
ZB's newsroom thought so too, thrusting the "PM's revelation" in at the top of its news headlines, while its stablemates nzherald.co.nz broke out the ruby-red nzherald.co.nz breaking news banner for it.
Streaming show Herald Now also pushed the news, crediting Hosking for the scoop - and so did The Press, barely half an hour after the PM's appearance on the show.
"Why don't we hear good news investment stories like that in our mainstream media?" Mike Hosking asked his listeners, ruefully and rhetorically.
But the PM hadn't revealed anything Amazon itself hadn't made public years ago - and it had been well-reported by the media since then too.
Not so new news
It was back in mid-2021 that Amazon first unveiled plans for three big data centres. The 1000 projected jobs and $11b over fifteen years came from Amazon's own economic own impact study at the time.
In 2022 Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern met Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle after two years of back and forth about data centres.
Documents RNZ's Phil Pennington requested back then under the OIA showed Amazon Web Services made "several requests as part of its investment commitment," according to officials. Intriguingly, two letters between AWS and the Prime Minister were withheld.
In 2023 RNZ also reported a long-term AWS deal for renewable energy with power company Mercury.
When AWS appointed a country manager for New Zealand in late 2024, it invited some local journalists to a Las Vegas tech event to talk to him.
Last December, New Zealand Herald business reporter Madison Reidy - now Madison Malone - revealed Amazon's opening date would be this year.
While the exact locations of the three data centres were a secret (and still are officially, according to AWS this week) Reidy said property records revealed a location in Auckland's northwest.
It's the same place DCI - a multinational that makes and runs data centres on behalf of various Big Tech firms - is also building at Westgate.
The Herald's own tech writer Chris Keall was also on the case reporting the site as Westgate, where Microsoft and DCI had already built similar facilities.
The Herald, RNZ, Stuff and Newsroom all reported on building and flooding problems there in 2024.
On the day of the AWS launch last Tuesday, many in the the media seemed to have forgotten or ignored all of that.
"Journalists are accustomed to old announcements being dressed up as something new... but Tuesday morning's missive from AWS really hit it out of the park," wrote The Post business editor Dita Di Boni.
As Tuesday morning passed, news websites re-cast it as "a re-announcement", while ZB's website reported the PM as 'giving an update on Amazon's investment'.
And by the time the Prime Minister spoke to reporters at AWS, he was asked why he was announcing something already announced four years ago.
"I've acknowledged it's been a work in progress since 2021, but it's launched and live - and today I'm drawing attention to this significant investment. This has been coming for some time and I've been up front about that. I'm just excited and it's an example of what we wanted to see more of," Luxon told reporters.
But if the PM was just sharing his excitement, the media were too on Tuesday morning.
Time passes, tone changes
By 6pm TV news time, the bulletins were also amplifying the grievances of Labour, which accused the the PM of picking low-hanging fruit they planted.
There was much 'google-it' mirth about Labour's 'FIGJAM PM' claim, but a better story was whether the AWS plan from 2021 was actually going to plan.
When the announcement was over on Tuesday, reporters who had kept up realised there wasn't any evidence the three data centres announced in 2022 had been built - or would be.
On Tuesday, a piece by The Herald's tech insider Chris Keall - who'd been keeping an eye on Amazon's land in northwest Auckland - showed the site was virtually abandoned.
Newsroom Pro editor Jonothan Milne also reported Amazon had given up on the build because of rising power prices since 2021.
"Shows just how much has changed in its much-vaunted expansion plans in four years," he wrote.
Milne also said photos and videos supplied to media actually showed big data centres overseas - and the company hadn't built what it proposed in 2021.
And he said country manager Manuel Bohnet wouldn't say much about the company's sites, citing security reasons.
"One of the clumsiest and most embarrassing attempts to evade answering a question I've seen from any business leader, for a long time," was Milne's verdict.
Power prices paid and people employed at Mercury making their green energy were probably also included in those impressive GDP-boosting sums from five years ago, he wrote.
The managing director of rival cloud storage company Catalyst IT - Don Christie - told Newsroom Amazon had probably stacked its hardware up at an existing data centre, and that's what was really being launched to clients on Tuesday.
"You need to see (this) as part of a marketing play on Amazon's part. Recently in Australia where they wheeled out Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister and they re announced $20b of investment in data centres there."
The Post's Dita Di Boni said power supply was among the unanswered questions.
Overseas, small nuclear reactors have been commissioned alongside large data centres to power them.
"After being queried on (the AWS) long-term power supply agreement with Mercury... local boss Manuel Bohnet said the power was drawn directly from the power grid," di Boni said.
"And he would not answer questions about how the centres were cooled. This is an environmental question mark, given the copious amounts of water generally used in this process," she added.
"Anything where we're seeing billions of dollars come in in investment, that is a good thing. But the worm has turned a little bit on big tech because it really is shoring up that sort of cozy duopoly - or oligopoly - that these companies have over our data - and increasingly over our energy supply as well," tech journalist Peter Griffin told ZB's Afternoons show on Wednesday.
Heather du Plessis-Allan reached a similar conclusion sounded off on Newstalk ZB soon after.
"If another local company used those data centres and paid full tax like they do, we'd all be better off than Amazon using the centres and then sending hundreds of millions of dollars overseas, like Google and Facebook do," she said.
That's an arrangement the media here really ought to understand. It's what they've been up against themselves for much of the past 20 years.
"I think you should interrogate an announcement just a little bit more than simply taking it at face value, because that is what Amazon wants you to do. They want to play us for fools," she said.
Anyone listening to ZB the previous day push the story as 'exclusive' would be thinking the same thing.
"New Zealand must do the deal with the data centre devil, because we want the productivity gains powered by this infrastructure," The Post's Dita di Boni said.
"But to the extent US companies feel they need any kind of social licence to operate - it would help to employ a public relations strategy that did not rely on the goldfish-like memory of citizens or the opportunistic nature of politicians to make claims of beneficence that don't really stack up."
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