The US tech giant said it had signed an agreement with Poland’s state-backed National Cloud Operator to provide “cloud solutions for all industries and companies in Poland”, according to a statement on its website.

“Another great global player chose Poland to locate its investment, worth as much as $ 1 billion, the largest in our region of Europe,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Tuesday on his official Facebook page.

“This is another important step on the road to digitisation and accelerating the development of the entire Polish economy.”

The investment project is expected to last seven years, Microsoft said.

Microsoft is among the global leaders in providing cloud services — an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

As well as charging for the service, cloud operators are able to harvest huge caches data and open up many other revenue streams.

The National Cloud Operator was set up two years ago by the state-controlled PKO Bank and the Polish National Development fund to speed development of the digital economy.

Once among the EU’s most rapidly expanding economies, growth in Poland is set to shrink by 3.4 per cent this year, according to a revised government projection, down from an expansion of 3.7 per cent of GDP forecast prior to the pandemic.

AFP