The world’s largest carmaker is standardizing its manufacturing infrastructure on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud.

Volkswagen AG and AWS today announced a multiyear deal to build a cloud analytics platform that will process data from all 122 of the German auto giant’s global factories.

The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, as it’s called, will also be linked over time to the facilities of the carmaker’s 1,500 partners and suppliers. The goal is to harness the operational information generated at these sites to identify ways of improving the overall supply chain.

The foundation of the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will be a companywide data lake set to be built on AWS’ S3 object storage service. The carmaker will use it to centralize information from its various plants, industrial systems and partner facilities so everything can be processed in one place.

One way Volkswagen plans to harness this data is by running analyses to find opportunities to reduce waste at manufacturing facilities. The carmaker is also hoping to improve its ability to forecast business changes. And the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will be used for more day-to-day tasks as well, including the tracking of auto parts as they travel across the company’s supply chain.

The carmaker will rely in large part on AWS’ own data-crunching services to support these activities. According to the companies, the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will make use of the provider’s connected device management and analytics products, as well as its SageMaker artificial intelligence development toolkit.

The platform will also have an on-premises component. Volkswagen plans to base it partially on AWS Outposts, a recently announced system, promised in production later this year, that enables companies to deploy some of the cloud provider’s services in their own data centers. The carmaker intends to use it to power latency-sensitive applications that can’t afford the delay of sending data to the cloud for processing and then waiting on the results to travel back.

Given the size of Volkswagen’s supply chain, the project has the potential to bring in quite a bit of revenue for AWS. The carmaker employs more than 300,000 workers worldwide and sold 10.8 million cars in 2018.

AWS is not the only major cloud provider with which Volkswagen has partnered to modernize its infrastructure. Six months ago, the company struck a similar deal with Microsoft Corp. to build a connected car services platform on top of Azure. The services delivered as part of the project are set to become available in 5 million new vehicles every year starting from 2020.

Photo: Picryl