Source: Radio New Zealand
The site which was planned to be used by Amazon in Westgate, Auckland. Google Maps / Screenshot
Amazon’s New Zealand data centre arm has taken a roughly $45 million hit after shelving a planned West Auckland development, newly filed accounts show.
Financial statements for Amazon Data Services New Zealand Ltd for the year to December 31, 2025, reveal the company booked a $44.9 million impairment in 2025 after deciding “not to continue with the planned development of the site.”
The write-down related to land holdings, which were reduced to a recoverable value of about $62.7 million.
While the filing does not explicitly name the location, Amazon’s only publicly disclosed greenfield development in New Zealand had been a proposed hyperscale data centre in Westgate, Auckland.
The scale of the write-down and the reference to undeveloped land implies the impaired site relates to that project.
The impairment drove the subsidiary to a pre-tax loss of $36 million in 2025, reversing a profit a year earlier. It was recorded within operating expenses and accounted for the bulk of the decline.
Despite the write-down, Amazon appeared to be continuing to invest heavily in its New Zealand footprint, with total assets above $650 million.
Those investments appear to be being redirected into new servers, networking gear and leasing capacity in other data centres, rather than new builds.
Between December 2024 and December 2025, the value of equipment on its books surged to more than $250 million from about $5 million, while lease assets climbed to about $285 million from roughly $244 million, with a further $162 million in future lease commitments yet to begin.
At the same time, assets under construction have dropped to zero.
Rather than building its own sites, it looks like Amazon in New Zealand is shifting to a “lease-and-equip” model – buying capacity and filling it, rather than building from scratch.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand