Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Those are just a few of the household names that have invested in Poland’s cloud and data industries. The cloud computing market in the country is forecast to grow with an increase of 24% year on year to around $1.2 billion USD this year, the Warsaw Business Journal reported April 18, and by 2030, Poland’s widespread adoption of cloud tech could produce a value equal to 4% of the country's annual GDP, or around $28.9 billion, according to a 2021 report from McKinsey Digital.
Weather report. Marta Różańska—who was named one of the Top 10 Women in Cloud Computing in Poland in 2023, told IT Brew in an email that Polish companies are “focused on innovation,” with cloud tech integrated “into their digital transformation strategies.” Besides strategy, the economy also plays a major role.
“Poland has the biggest and most stable economy in middle-Eastern Europe,” Różańska, who now works as a postdoc researcher in AI for Security at IDEAS NCBR, a Warsaw-based research and development center, said. “Poland’s economy is still growing, but the labor cost is still relatively lower than that of other European countries. It is no surprise that Big Tech companies find this region interesting.”
Poland has also drawn in founders like Sam Altman, who previously considered Poland for a new OpenAI branch that would focus on research and engineering, according to The Observer. Last year, Palo Alto Networks also announced it was investing in Poland with a new local cloud infrastructure, and Microsoft opened up its first data center region in the country as part of its “digital transformation” plan—a plan that comes with a billion-dollar investment in the “Polish Digital Valley.”
With 25,000 employees in Poland, Amazon is another tech giant that has established a presence in the country. Tomasz Stachlewski, the head of technology for Central and Eastern Europe at Amazon Web Services, told IT Brew in an email that AWS has provided training in cloud computing to more than 100,000 people in the country since 2017. “More broadly, Amazon’s economic impact in Poland spans over $2.1 billion invested since 2014 across 16 logistics sites, AWS Local Zone, renewable energy projects, and more,” Stachlewski wrote.
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Poland is also “an important market for Google Cloud,” according to Mathias Raeck, a spokesperson for Google Cloud. Raeck told IT Brew in an email that the company launched its first-ever cloud region in Poland in 2021. The following year, Google invested nearly $700 million in a hub in Warsaw, where “Google Cloud Engineering currently develops a number of our most advanced solutions powering Google Cloud.”
“Since then, Google has continued its investments in Warsaw and Kraków to create one of the largest cloud, AI, and security engineering hubs for Google Cloud in Europe,” he wrote.
Besides major US tech giants investing in Poland, local companies are also keeping cloud at the forefront with many of the big, local players having “dedicated cloud departments,” which reflects the “widespread adoption of cloud solutions across various sectors,” according to Różańska. Polish startups have also embraced cloud-native applications, she noted, which allows them to “scale and adapt rapidly to changing market demands.”
Up next. The IT market in Poland is expected to increase in value this year to around $35 billion, according to the International Trade Administration.
OpenAI, and Palo Alto did not respond to IT Brew’s request for comment. A representative for Microsoft provided a blog post but did not have anything further to share at this time.