Amazon has introduced the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, aiming to give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as financial services, retail, education, government, and nonprofit organisations, greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centres located in New Zealand.
As part of its long-term commitment to the region, Amazon is planning to invest more than NZ$7.5 billion in the country to support the construction, connection, operation, and maintenance of its data centres in the country.
Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the New Zealand government signed in 2023, Amazon has also committed to train 100,000 people in New Zealand in cloud skills and has already provided training to more than 50,000 individuals.
As part of its commitment to contribute to the development of digital skills, AWS will hire and develop additional local personnel to operate and support the new AWS Region in New Zealand.
AWS Partners in New Zealand include Accenture, Arcanum, CustomD, CyberCX, Datacom, Deloitte, The Instillery, Lancom, MongoDB, Westcon-Comstor, and more.
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region consists of three Availability Zones at launch, giving AWS 120 Availability Zones across 38 AWS Regions globally.
AWS has plans for 10 more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Chile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
AWS' VP of infrastructure services Prasad Kalyanaraman said the new AWS Region in New Zealand will help serve the growing demand for cloud services across the country and empower organisations of all sizes to accelerate their digital transformation.
"With this launch, businesses can now leverage advanced AWS technologies, from core cloud capabilities to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all while meeting local data residency requirements," said Kalyanaraman.
"By investing in New Zealand's digital infrastructure, we're proud to support the country's economic growth, foster innovation, and help position it as a technology hub in the Asia Pacific region."
Continuing investment in New Zealand
In 2016, AWS enhanced New Zealand’s connectivity to the global AWS network by establishing diverse, high-capacity subsea cable connections, improving network reliability and performance for customers.
In 2020, AWS launched two Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Auckland. Amazon CloudFront is a 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 2023, AWS established an AWS Direct Connect location in Auckland, allowing customers to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data centre, office, or colocation environment.
Also in 2023, AWS expanded its infrastructure footprint in New Zealand with the launch of an AWS Local Zones location in Auckland.
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 centres, enabling customers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users.
Amazon estimates the ongoing operation of the new AWS Region will add approximately NZ$10.8 billion to New Zealand’s gross domestic product and support an average of more than 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs, including facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and others, at external businesses annually.
