Amazon Web Services plans growth in Asia
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is increasing its presence in a key Asian market.
The hosted cloud services division of Amazon intends to launch a new AWS infrastructure region in Taiwan in 2025. The company has been making multibillion-dollar commitments to expand its cloud infrastructure both in the U.S. and globally in the past 12 months, most recently announcing it will launch AWS infrastructure regions in Mexico by early 2025 and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2026.
The new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) region will provide developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises; as well as education, entertainment, financial services and nonprofit organizations, a platform for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in Taiwan.
The new AWS region will consist of three availability zones at launch, adding to AWS’s existing 105 availability zones across 33 geographic regions globally.
AWS regions consist of availability zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations, 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.
Each availability zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple availability zones to achieve greater fault tolerance.
AWS plans to launch 21 more availability zones and seven more AWS regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. As part of a long-term commitment, AWS says it is planning to invest billions of dollars in Taiwan over the next 15 years.
AWS offers a portfolio of services including analytics, AI, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, storage and other cloud technologies. The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) region will enable users to store their content securely in Taiwan.
In addition, AWS will continue to invest in upskilling students, local developers and technical professionals, nontechnical professionals and IT leaders in Saudi Arabia through a variety of offerings.
Since 2017, AWS says it has trained more than100,000 people in Taiwan. This initiative builds on an existing AWS commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people around the world by 2025.
"AWS is committed to helping customers of all sizes and across all industries accelerate their digital transformation with the highest levels of security and resilience available," said Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of infrastructure services at AWS. "The new AWS Region in Taiwan will enable organizations to unlock the full potential of the cloud and build with AWS technologies like compute, storage, databases, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive innovation and transform the way businesses and institutions serve their customers. We look forward to helping customers and AWS Partners in Taiwan deliver cloud-enabled applications to accelerate growth, productivity, and innovation with lower latency from data centers located in Taiwan."