AWS has revealed plans to set up an infrastructure region in Taiwan by early 2025 in light of the explosion in demand for cloud services in the Asia-Pacific.
AWS has made investments in Taiwan since 2014. The latest network investment highlighted in its May 2022 statement on “Local Zones” was a second Local Zone in Taipei. However, the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) region is due to launch, changing this by opening large-scale data centres that can deliver low-latency, high-speed transmission services from local storage to customers in Taiwan.
From its global data centres, AWS delivers a full range of cloud services, including computing, storage, databases, analytics, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Some of the top businesses in Taiwan have started to process workloads using AWS services. These include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Chunghwa Telecom, Cathay Financial Holding, Acer, Trend Micro and Gamania Digital Entertainment.
Prasad Kalyanaraman, AWS’s vice president of infrastructure services, emphasized that the new AWS region in Taiwan will empower businesses to harness cloud technology and take full advantage of AWS’s comprehensive service offerings.
In simple terms, an AWS region is a cluster of interconnected data centres within a geographical area. AWS, which has now expanded to 105 availability zones in 33 geographic regions worldwide, will open the new Taiwan zone. An availability zone is an isolated location within a region that contains one or more data centres with redundant power, cooling, and physical security facilities.
The expansion will cover a broad spectrum of entities, including developers, startups, companies, non-profits, and educational institutions, as well as businesses in other industries, such as entertainment and financial services. This will provide them with more locations to deploy their applications and serve users from data centres in Taiwan. AWS also stated that it will continue to allow customers with a pressing need to store their content within Taiwan to retain their content locally.
The cloud service provider plans to invest billions of dollars in Taiwan over the next 15 years, underscoring its long-term commitment to the region. This significant investment is a testament to the strategic importance of Taiwan in AWS’s global expansion plans, making the audience feel valued and significant in the global tech landscape.
AWS’s expansion in Taiwan comes amid a larger push in the Asia-Pacific region. In March, the company said it would invest at least $6 billion through 2037 to create a new region in Malaysia. They also announced in October 2022 a plan to invest $5 billion over 15 years in Thailand. These two announcements follow the December 2021 launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Top tech firms are also churning out massive funding in the APAC region. The government seeks to expand its digital economy and attract high-technology companies with the hope of forming a tech hub in Malaysia. Google said it will spend $2 billion in the country to build its first data centre and cloud region in Malaysia. Microsoft also announced plans to invest in AI and cloud initiatives in Malaysia, as well as similar deals in Thailand and Indonesia, as part of a renewed focus on Southeast Asia.
According to Synergy Research Group, AWS leads the cloud infrastructure services market with a 31% market share in the first quarter of this year. This places Microsoft’s Azure in second, highlighting how the cloud industry is arguably the hottest sector in all of technology right now.
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Tags: AWS, cloud, Digital Transformation