Last Thursday, Amazon announced the opening of its new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region.
In a statement, the company said this new region will give developers, businesses, and organizations in areas like education, entertainment, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and nonprofits more options for running their apps and services using AWS in Taiwan. It also means customers who want to keep their data within the country can now do so.
As part of its long-term plans, Amazon will invest over $5 billion to build, connect, run, and maintain its data centers in Taiwan.
The new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region includes three Availability Zones at launch. This brings the total to 117 Availability Zones across 37 AWS Regions around the world.
With this announcement, AWS also shared plans to add 13 more Availability Zones and open four new AWS Regions in Chile, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
To help build digital skills, AWS plans to hire and train more local staff to run and support its 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 computing 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.
Taiwan Premier Jung-tai Cho said the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region shows Amazon’s strong support for Taiwan.
He added that this investment highlights Taiwan’s important role in the global supply chain and reflects the strong partnership 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 technological innovation globally,” he added.
The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region is built with data sovereignty in mind, just like the AWS Cloud has been from the beginning.
AWS provides a wide range of cloud services, including tools for data analysis, computing, content delivery, databases, AI, machine learning, networking, storage, and more.
To help more people in Asia Pacific use cloud technology, Amazon is investing in training programs in Taiwan. These programs—like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder—aim to teach students, local developers, IT professionals, and even non-technical workers the skills they need for cloud-related jobs.
Since 2017, Amazon has helped over nine million people in Asia Pacific and Japan learn cloud skills, including more than 200,000 people in Taiwan.
The company also said it’s working to become more environmentally friendly, aiming to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040—10 years earlier than the target set by the Paris Agreement.
This goal is part of Amazon’s commitment through The Climate Pledge.
The new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region is part of Amazon’s continued investment in Taiwan to offer customers advanced and secure cloud services.
This new region will allow customers who need to keep their data in Taiwan to do so safely, help reduce delays in accessing services (lower latency), and meet the growing demand for cloud services across the Asia Pacific.
Customers of all kinds—from startups to big companies, government groups, and nonprofits—can use AWS’s advanced cloud technology to create new ideas and solutions.
AWS first started working in Taipei in 2014 with an Amazon CloudFront location, adding another one in 2018.
Amazon CloudFront is a secure and fast network that helps deliver data, videos, apps, and APIs quickly to users all over the world.
Also, in 2018, AWS set up two Direct Connect locations in Taipei. These let customers connect their own data centers or offices directly and privately to AWS for better security and speed.
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