Amazon’s AWS to launch new infrastructure region in Taiwan amid rapid Asia-Pacific expansion

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of the U.S. tech giant, is launching an infrastructure region in Taiwan by early 2025, as it seeks to meet “high demand for cloud services” in the Asia-Pacific region, the company announced Wednesday.

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 is a physical location where data centers are clustered.

The new region will consist of three availability zones at launch, adding to AWS’s existing 105 availability zones across 33 geographic regions around the world, the firm said. An availability zone is an isolated and geographically separate location with one or more data centers with independent power, cooling, and physical security.

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.

The cloud service provider will also be pumping billions of dollars in Taiwan over the next 15 years, according to the statement.

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 will commit at least $6 billion by 2037 into a new region in Malaysia, after laying out plans in October 2022 to launch a region in Thailand with a $5 billion investment over 15 years.

AWS had opened a region in the Indonesia capital of Jakarta in December 2021.

Other tech giants like Microsoft and Google have also been investing billions of dollars into the Asia-Pacific region.

Google last month announced it will put $2 billion in Malaysia and build its first data center and cloud region in the country.

Microsoft said it will make AI- and cloud-related investments in several Southeast Asian countries — Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia — as it doubles down on the region.

AWS was the leader in the cloud infrastructure services market in the first quarter of this year, clinching 31% of market share, according to Synergy Research Group. Microsoft Azure followed behind AWS in the second spot.