Amazon Web Services Inc. has inked a deal to build data centers in Australia for the country’s defense and intelligence agencies.

Officials announced the project today at a press conference in Canberra. The initiative is expected to cost 2 billion Australian dollars, or $1.3 billion, over the next decade. AWS estimates that it will support up to 2,000 local jobs. 

The TS Cloud, as the planned data center cluster is called, will reportedly comprise three cloud facilities. AWS intends to set up a local subsidiary to operate the facilities. According to Bloomberg, the TS Cloud will be used to store top-secret data from Australia’s defense and intelligence agencies.

AWS detailed that the data center cluster will be optimized to facilitate efficient information sharing between Australia’s defense and intelligence agencies. According to The Register, officials also expect the TS Cloud to enable “greater interoperability and deeper collaboration with the United States.” A third goal of the project is to improve the resilience of the Australian government’s technology infrastructure.

AWS expects the TS Cloud to benefit from its investments in local renewable energy projects. Last year, the cloud giant commissioned a solar farm in northeastern Australia that will produce enough energy to power more than 60,000 homes. AWS previously invested in a half-dozen other renewable energy projects throughout the country.

“With the TS Cloud, Australia’s Defence and Intelligence agencies will have the ability to select from AWS’s services across compute, storage, databases, analytics, AI and ML,” said Iain Rouse, the managing director of AWS’ public sector business in Australia and New Zealand. “The cloud eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting of sourcing and maintaining IT hardware, and enables a mission first focus.”

AWS opened its first Australian data center cluster in 2012. The AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, as the cluster is called, comprises three data center campuses. Those campuses have separate power and networking infrastructure, which reduces the risk that a localized issue at one facility will take the others offline.

The cloud giant opened its second local cloud region, in Melbourne, last year. Similarly to the Sydney region, it comprises three data center sites. Its Australian infrastructure footprint also includes one Local Zone, a cloud facility optimized to host latency-sensitive workloads.

The announcement of the TS Cloud comes three years after AWS made a 10-figure infrastructure investment in New Zealand. The Amazon unit committed 7.5 billion New Zealand dollars, or $4.6 billion, to building a local cloud region with three data center campuses. AWS announced at the time that the region was expected to come online in 2024.

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