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.
In 2021 when Amazon announced the data centre construction plan, it said the investment would create 1000 direct and indirect jobs and claimed it would add about $10.8bn to the local economy over the next 15 years.
Then-Minister for Digital Economy and Communications David Clark said it was a vote of confidence in the country's economic recovery from the pandemic.
Then-National Party digital economy spokesperson Melissa Lee said the investment would encourage more young people to pursue careers in the tech sector.
A letter from Amazon to then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern showed the US tech firm celebrating an "ambitious partnership" with the New Zealand government.
