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.
STRONG INTEREST: Analysts have pointed to optimism in TSMC’s growth prospects in the artificial intelligence era as the cause of the rising number of shareholders The number of people holding shares of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) hit a new high last week despite a decline in its stock price, the Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corp (TDCC, 台灣集保) said. The number of TSMC shareholders rose to 2.46 million as of Friday, up 75,536 from a week earlier, TDCC data showed. The stock price fell 1.34 percent during the same week to close at NT$1,840 (US$57.55). The decline in TSMC’s share price resulted from volatility in global tech stocks, driven by rising international crude oil prices as the war against Iran continues. Dealers said
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
China is clamping down on fertilizer exports to protect its domestic market, industry sources said, putting an additional strain on global markets that were already grappling with shortages caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran. China is among the largest fertilizer exporters — shipping more than US$13 billion of it last year — and it has a history of controlling exports to keep prices low for farmers. Shipments through the war-blocked Strait of Hormuz account for about one-third of the sea-borne supply. This month, Beijing banned exports of nitrogen-potassium fertilizer blends and certain phosphate varieties, sources said. The ban, which has not
AMAZING ABUNDANCE: Elon Musk has announced plans for a new facility in Texas which would manufacture chips for Tesla and SpaceX to use in robotics and AI Elon Musk said his Terafab project — a grand plan to eventually manufacture his own chips for robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and space data centers — would be built in Austin and jointly run by Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX). Musk, the chief executive officer of the two companies, said he would start off with an “advanced technology fab” in Austin that would have all of the equipment necessary to make chips of any kind. The project would call for one day supporting 1 terawatt (TW) of computing power per year, the amount Musk expects the companies to
RSS