Amazon Web Services, the American tech giant's cloud computing division, has revealed plans to establish an infrastructure region in Taiwan by early 2025. The decision comes in response to the significant demand for cloud services in the Asia-Pacific area. "The new AWS region in Taiwan will enable firms to capitalize on the cloud and build with AWS technologies like compute, storage, databases, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence", said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services at AWS, in a statement.
An AWS region represents a tangible site where data centers are grouped together. Upon its launch, the new region will initially comprise three availability zones, contributing to AWS's current count of 105 availability zones spread across 33 distinct geographic regions globally. Each availability zone serves as an independent and geographically segregated site containing one or more data centers equipped with autonomous power, cooling, and physical security systems.
"It will enable developers, startups and companies, non-profit organizations, as well as institutions involved in education, entertainment and financial services a greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in Taiwan, ensuring that customers who want to keep their content in Taiwan can do so", AWS said.
According to the statement, the cloud service provider will also invest billions of dollars in Taiwan over the next 15 years. The latest development comes a month after AWS announced it will invest an additional $9 billion into Singapore over the next five years to grow its cloud infrastructure and services in the country. AWS said in March last year it would commit at least $6 billion by 2037 to a new region in Malaysia. It had also laid out plans in October 2022 to launch a region in Thailand with a $5 billion investment over 15 years.
In December 2021, AWS inaugurated a region in Jakarta, Indonesia. Concurrently, other industry behemoths such as Microsoft and Google have been injecting substantial investments into the Asia-Pacific region. Just recently, Google disclosed plans to inject $2 billion into Malaysia for the establishment of its inaugural data center and cloud region. Similarly, Microsoft has committed to significant AI and cloud-related investments across multiple Southeast Asian nations, including Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, as it intensifies its focus on the region. As per Synergy Research Group's findings for the first quarter of this year, AWS maintained its lead in the cloud infrastructure services market, securing a 31% share, with Microsoft Azure trailing closely behind in the second position.