Amazon has announced that it is creating 1,000 new permanent jobs in Ireland over the next two years.
The move will bring Amazon's total permanent workforce in the country to 5,000 people.
The roles will be spread throughout the company's locations in Dublin, the Cork Airport Business Park, and at the Esk wind farm in North Cork, which is set to open in September.
The wind farm will be Amazon’s first operational renewable energy project outside the USA.
Mike Beary, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ireland country manager, said that Amazon had a partnership with a developer who was able to secure the land and planning permission for the wind farm in Cork.
"It will help us reach our goal of getting to 100% renewable energy for all of our infrastructure by 2025," he said.
The Cork office will also grow.
"Cork was our original site," he said. "We opened there in 2004. That site started as a customer service centre and has evolved over the last 15+ years.
"There's now a significant number of people working with merchants who brought their businesses to the Amazon platform, there's teams working on [transaction security], and there are a lot of programme leadership teams down there.
"The Cork team have also invested in employees that can work from home. We have a significant number of people, even before Covid, who were in full-time roles working from home in Cork, Kerry, and Limerick. We anticipate we will have further roles like that."
There will also be new roles created in Dublin, and a new 170,000 sq ft campus will be built in Charlemont Square. The campus will be home to Amazon Web Service's growing cloud computing workforce, and is expected to open in 2022.
Mr Beary says that Amazon invested in Ireland because of the expansion of customer demand, as well as the talent.
"More and more people are shopping online ... in terms of the AWS side, many enterprises, small businesses, even government agencies, are moving onto the cloud because of the flexibility it gives ... Covid has accelerated the trends we have seen, with people making a transition to a digital company," he said.
"We have been fortunate with being able to attract great talent to our teams here, both from hiring people locally in Ireland and also encouraging people to move from other parts of Europe for a role. Because of that, we are pretty confident we will be able to extend our reach and add an additional 1,000 jobs here."
The new employment opportunities will range from software development engineers, network development engineers, systems development engineers, optical deployment engineers, database engineers, dev ops engineers, and support engineers.