Published: Jan 24, 2023
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of its second cloud region in Melbourne, Australia. The new Asia Pacific region (codenamed: ap-southeast-4) will consist of three Availability Zones, and it should help customers comply with data residency and regulatory requirements.
AWS first announced its plans to open the new Melbourne region back in December 2020. The company plans to invest $4.5 billion in the country by 2037. This AWS cloud region is expected to drive economic development by creating more than 25,000 full-time job opportunities for local people annually. It will provide services such as storage, compute, networking, developer tools, business applications, data analytics, security, and more.
“The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region adds to our ongoing infrastructure expansion and investments in Australia since we launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region in 2012. We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS Partners,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of Infrastructure Services at AWS.
Additionally, AWS has pledged to become a carbon-negative organization by 2040. Moreover, the company highlighted three projects that will generate 717,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy annually to support 115,000 Australian households.
Since 2017, AWS has announced various programs (like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Industry Quest) to train more than 200,000 Australian citizens with cloud skills. The company has announced a new “Victorian Digital Skills” program to help local people gain access to higher-paying jobs.
Meanwhile, AWS continues to invest in data centers to better compete with rivals like Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. The new Melbourne region will join the existing cloud regions already available in the Asia Pacific region. These include Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Sydney, Seoul, Jakarta, Osaka, Beijing, and Ningxia regions.