Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to invest billions of dollars over the next 15 years to build data centers in Taiwan and create an infrastructure region in the country by early next year, the Amazon.com Inc cloud computing subsidiary said yesterday.
The new “AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region” aims to help customers and AWS partners in Taiwan store their content securely and run cloud-enabled workloads with lower latency from data centers in Taiwan, the company said.
The project reflects AWS’ long-term commitment to Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific region amid growing demand for cloud services, it said.
Photo: Reuters
The move comes as Taiwan has become a major data center market for global cloud service providers amid rising demand for digital transformation, artificial intelligence and clean energy. In 2013, Google opened a data center in Changhua County, while Microsoft Corp is building a data center in Taoyuan that is scheduled to open later this year.
AWS provides customers computing, data storage, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence services from its data centers around the world.
In Taiwan, companies, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控), Acer Inc (宏碁), Trend Micro Inc (趨勢科技) and Gamania Digital Entertainment Co (遊戲橘子), are using AWS’ services to deal with workloads.
AWS said it has steadily increased its investment in Taiwan since 2014, with the launch of “Local Zones” in Taipei in 2022, its most recent major infrastructure deployment in the country.
Compared with Local Zones, the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region’s data center would be larger in scale, and can provide customers with low latency, high-speed transmission services because it stores data domestically, it said.
The new AWS region in Taiwan would consist of three “Availability Zones” at launch, the company said.
Currently, AWS operates 105 Availability Zones in 33 geographic regions globally, it said.
Availability Zones feature infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations, with the zones far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, while being close enough to provide low-latency access for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones, AWS said.
Each zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks, it said, adding that customers could design their applications to run in multiple zones to achieve a greater fault tolerance.
“With today’s announcement, AWS has plans to launch 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud,” it said.
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