Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to open an infrastructure region in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2024. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) and join the existing 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic AWS Regions at launch. The Region will be owned and operated by a local AWS entity in New Zealand.
Globally, AWS has announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the new AWS Region in New Zealand. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in New Zealand, ensuring that customers who want to keep their data in New Zealand are able to do so.
AWS also released an economic impact study (EIS) that estimates it will create 1000 new jobs through investment of NZ$7.5 billion (US$5.3 billion) in the new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region with an estimated economic impact on New Zealand’s GDP of NZ$10.8 billion (US$7.7 billion) over the next 15 years.
“AWS supports thousands of organizations across New Zealand in their drive to innovate, succeed, and grow globally. AWS Cloud technology is providing new ways for government to further engage with citizens, for enterprises to innovate for their next phase of growth, and for entrepreneurs to build businesses and compete on a global scale,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services, AWS. “Our investments reflect AWS’s deep and long-term commitment to New Zealand. We are excited to build new world-class infrastructure locally, train New Zealanders with in-demand digital skills, and continue to help local organizations deliver applications that accelerate digital transformation and fuel economic growth.”
AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to help support customers’ business continuity, yet 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 even greater fault tolerance. The AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will enable local customers with data residency preferences to securely store data in Aotearoa, while providing even lower latency across the country.
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. AWS offers the broadest and deepest portfolio of services including analytics, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, storage, and more. Customers in New Zealand already benefit from Amazon’s ongoing investment in its global backbone through the Hawaiki Submarine Cable, a 9,300 mile (15,000 kilometer) transpacific cable system in operation since 2018 that provides a low-latency and high-bandwidth connection from Australia to New Zealand and the United States.
According to the newly released EIS, AWS plans to invest NZ$7.5 billion (US$5.3 billion) in New Zealand over the next 15 years through the new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region, which includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centers, operational expenses such as ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses. The EIS estimates that spending on construction and operation of AWS infrastructure in New Zealand is expected to increase New Zealand’s GDP by approximately NZ$10.8 billion (US$7.7 billion) over the next 15 years. The EIS also establishes that the new AWS Region should bring direct and indirect economic benefits like new employment and sales for the data center supply chain and related sectors. In total, an estimated 1000 new full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs will be created in New Zealand from this investment.
The upcoming AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region expands on AWS’s ongoing investment in New Zealand since setting up the first local AWS entity (AWS New Zealand) in Auckland in 2014. AWS has also launched two Amazon CloudFront edge locations and AWS Outposts in Auckland. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any data center, colocation space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. This year, AWS expanded its presence further, opening new offices for AWS New Zealand in Auckland and Wellington to support a growing team of more than 100 employees, including solutions architects, account managers, sales representatives, professional services consultants, and experts to help customers migrate workloads to the cloud.
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