AWS has revealed plans to establish an infrastructure region in Taiwan by early 2025, in response to the explosive growth in demand for cloud services in the Asia-Pacific region.
AWS has been investing in Taiwan since 2014. Its most recent network investment, highlighted in a statement on “Local Zones” in May 2022, was a second Local Zone in Taipei. However, this will change with the planned launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, opening a large-scale data center capable of providing local storage to low-latency, high-speed transmission services to customers in Taiwan.
AWS offers a wide range of cloud services including computing, storage, databases, analytics, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence from data centers worldwide. Some of Taiwan’s top companies have started using AWS services to run their workloads, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Chunghwa Telecom, Cathay Financial Holding, Acer, Trend Micro, and Gamania Digital Entertainment.
Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services at AWS, highlighted that the new AWS region in Taiwan will enable businesses to take advantage of cloud technologies and make the most of AWS’ comprehensive service offerings.
Simply put, an AWS Region is a collection of interconnected data centers within a geographic area. AWS, which currently has expanded to 105 availability zones in 33 geographic regions around the world, is opening a new Taiwan Zone. An availability zone is an isolated location within a region that contains one or more data centers with redundant power, cooling, and physical security facilities.
The expansion covers a wide range of organizations, including developers, startups, enterprises, non-profits, and educational institutions, as well as companies in other industries such as entertainment and financial services. It increases the number of locations where applications can be deployed and served to users from data centers in Taiwan. AWS also said it will continue to enable customers who have an urgent need to store content in Taiwan to keep it local.
The cloud services 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 Taiwan’s strategic importance to AWS’ global expansion plans and will ensure viewers feel valued and valued in the global technology industry.
AWS’ expansion in Taiwan comes as part of a larger effort in the Asia-Pacific region. The company announced in March that it would invest at least $6 billion by 2037 to establish a new region in Malaysia. In October 2022, it also announced plans to invest $5 billion in Thailand over 15 years. These two announcements follow the December 2021 opening of the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Big technology companies are also pouring billions into the Asia-Pacific region. The government is looking to build a technology hub in Malaysia as it seeks to expand its digital economy and attract tech companies. Google said it would spend $2 billion to build its first data center and cloud region in Malaysia. Microsoft also announced plans to invest in AI and cloud efforts in Malaysia as part of its new focus on Southeast Asia, and has similar deals in Thailand and Indonesia.
According to Synergy Research Group, AWS led the cloud infrastructure services market with 31% market share in the first quarter of this year, pushing Microsoft’s Azure into second place and highlighting that the cloud industry may currently be the hottest sector in the entire tech industry.
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