Google's future investments in Poland may run into billions of dollars, says head of PFR
A memorandum signed on Thursday by Poland's state development fund PFR and Google provides for a joint study of infrastructure needs in Poland, on which the size of the company's new investments will depend, PFR' head Piotr Matczuk told PAP. He added that it could be counted in billions of dollars.
"Google has the largest competence centre in this part of Europe in Poland and has ambitions to develop it further. The memorandum indicates the work that PFR will conduct together with Google to determine how the demand for Google's cloud and AI services will grow in Poland and the region," Matczuk said.
"The parties to the memorandum are working in the belief that Poland can be a leader in AI solutions in the region and even in Europe," he added.
The head of PFR said that the first stage of this work is expected to take about four to six months.
"We hope that this will result in new investments by Google in Poland and we are talking about a scale expressed in billions of dollars," Matczuk stated.
The head of PFR referred to media comments on the amount of USD 5 million that Google has pledged to develop digital competence in Poland.
"I have to admit that it was quite unfortunate that this information has been knocked out in the media coverage, without proper context. What is important is that a memorandum has been signed, which is the first step towards Google's new billion-dollar investment in Poland. We have a very big appetite for them," Matczuk said.
He pointed out that Google is not the only partner in the field of building digital infrastructure with which talks can take place.
"The memorandum does not exclude the possibility of cooperation with other companies. We may seek other partnerships," Matczuk said.
"However, our partnership with Google is so advanced that the natural consequence is that they were the first to talk with. Yet, we remain open and in parallel we will also talk about cooperation with other entities, as the Prime Minister said. We also invite Polish companies to join us," he added.
In an interview with PAP, Piotr Matczuk also stipulated that when negotiating the agreement, it was important for the Polish side to secure data sovereignty, as well as to embed this cooperation in the Polish and European regulatory framework.
Poland's state development fund PFR, National Cloud Operator and Google Cloud have signed a letter of intent to cooperate in the field of artificial intelligence; the aim is to develop a plan for the accelerated development of key sectors of the Polish economy.
Google has been operating in Poland since 2005. Google's offices in Warsaw, Cracow and Wroclaw employ more than 2,000 people. Development and engineering teams work on global projects ranging from advanced cloud technologies and AI solutions to ChromeOS and Pixel. In 2022, the company invested USD 700 million to acquire and develop The Warsaw HUB office complex.
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