Amazon announced last Thursday the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region.

The firm said in a statement that the new AWS Region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as education, entertainment, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and nonprofit organizations, greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from AWS data centers located in Taiwan, ensuring that customers who want to keep their content onshore can do so.

As part of its long-term commitment, Amazon is planning to invest more than $5 billion to support the construction, connection, operation, and maintenance of its data centers in Taiwan.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region consists of three Availability Zones at launch, giving AWS 117 Availability Zones across 37 AWS Regions globally.

With the announcement, AWS has plans for 13 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Chile, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

As part of its commitment to contribute to the development of digital skills, AWS plans to hire and develop additional local personnel to operate and support the new AWS Region in Taiwan.

“The new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region will enable organizations of all sizes to build and scale with confidence using our comprehensive suite of cloud services, ranging from foundational compute and storage to advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, all while meeting local data residency requirements,

“Organizations across Taiwan, and across Asia Pacific, can now leverage the same global infrastructure that millions of businesses worldwide rely on, while benefitting from single-digit millisecond latency, to accelerate innovation, increase operational efficiency, drive business growth, and deliver better experiences for their end users,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS.

Meanwhile, Jung-tai Cho, Premier of Taiwan, said that the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region showed Amazon’s strong commitment to Taiwan.

According to him, this investment also recognizes Taiwan as a pivotal partner in the global supply chain, and demonstrates the solid foundation of the collaboration between AWS and Taiwan.

“We are pleased to see AWS deepen its joint efforts with the Taiwan government and the industry to accelerate digital transformation and promote cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies,

“We look forward to contributing to fostering a robust digital ecosystem together to advance the technological innovation globally,” he added.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region is sovereign-by-design, just as the AWS Cloud has been since day one.

AWS offers the broadest and deepest portfolio of services, including analytics, compute, content delivery, database, generative AI, machine learning, networking, storage, and other cloud technologies.

To support the growth in cloud adoption across Asia Pacific, Amazon continues to invest in upskilling students, local developers and technical professionals, nontechnical professionals, and the next generation of information technology (IT) leaders in Taiwan through offerings like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder.

Since 2017, Amazon has trained more than nine million people across Asia Pacific and Japan on cloud skills, including more than 200,000 people in Taiwan.

Amazon said the firm is committed to becoming a more sustainable business and reaching net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040, ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement, as part of The Climate Pledge.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region is the latest in ongoing investments by Amazon in Taiwan to provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region will enable customers with data residency preferences or requirements to store their content securely in Taiwan, enable customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Asia Pacific.

Customers from startups to enterprises to government organizations and nonprofits will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud to drive innovation.

In 2014, AWS launched an Amazon CloudFront edge location in Taipei, followed by an additional location in 2018.

Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds.

In 2018, AWS established two AWS Direct Connect locations in Taipei, allowing customers to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data center, office, or colocation environment.

With the launch of the Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, AWS will establish an additional AWS Direct Connect location in Taipei.

In 2020, AWS launched AWS Outposts in Taiwan.

AWS Outposts is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

In 2022, AWS expanded its infrastructure footprint in Taiwan by launching AWS Local Zones in Taipei.

AWS Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industry, and IT centers, enabling customers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users.

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