Amazon commits over $4 billion to New Zealand data infrastructure
Amazon’s latest global effort to expand its data center capabilities is focused on New Zealand.
The online giant said it will invest approximately $4.4 billion to support the construction, connection, operation, and maintenance of its data centers in New Zealand. As part of this investment, the Amazon Web Services hosted cloud computing division of Amazon is launching the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region.
The new AWS Region will be designed to give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises; as well as financial services, retail, education, government, and nonprofit organizations, greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in New Zealand.
"The new AWS Region in New Zealand will help serve the growing demand for cloud services across the country and empower organizations of all sizes to accelerate their digital transformation," said Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of infrastructure services at AWS. "With this launch, businesses can now leverage advanced AWS technologies, from core cloud capabilities to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all while meeting local data residency requirements."
AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
AWS customers can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve greater fault tolerance. The company says that Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region consists of three Availability Zones at launch, giving AWS 120 Availability Zones across 38 AWS Regions globally.
Amazon has also committed billions of dollars to data infrastructure development projects across the globe, most recently in Australia. AWS has plans for 10 more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Chile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
[READ MORE: Amazon plans to invest $13 billion in Australia data centers]
"The launch of the AWS Region in New Zealand is an exciting moment. This investment in digital infrastructure and Amazon’s commitment to digital skills can accelerate New Zealand technology businesses and help New Zealanders to move into highly skilled, secure, and well-paid technology jobs — which exist right across the economy, from tech companies to various sectors including agriculture, finance, retail, professional services, government, and many more," said Graeme Muller, CEO at NZTech.
Through a memorandum of understanding with the New Zealand government, Amazon has committed to train 100,000 people in New Zealand in cloud skills and has already provided training to more than 50,000 individuals. AWS will hire and develop additional local personnel to operate and support the new AWS Region in New Zealand.
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region will be underpinned by renewable energy from launch, supported by a long-term project with Mercury NZ for the Turitea South wind farm. This project advances Amazon’s sustainability goals.
Amazon estimates the ongoing operation of the new AWS Region will add approximately $6.3 billion to New Zealand’s gross domestic product (GDP) and support an average of more than 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs, including facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and others, at external businesses annually.
