Amazon Launches Infrastructure Region in New Zealand

Amazon announced the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. The new region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as financial services, retail, education, and nonprofit organizations, more choices to run their applications and support end users from AWS data centers located in New Zealand. As part of its long-term commitment, Amazon plans to invest more than NZ$7.5 billion in New Zealand to support the construction, connection, operation, and maintenance of its data centers in the country.

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“The new AWS Region in New Zealand will help meet the growing demand for cloud services in the country and empower organizations of all sizes to accelerate their digital transformation,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS. “With this launch, businesses can now leverage advanced AWS technologies from core cloud capabilities to artificial intelligence and machine learning while meeting local data residency requirements. By investing in New Zealand’s digital infrastructure, we are proud to be part of its economic growth, fostering innovation, and helping the country become a technology hub in the Asia-Pacific region.”

“The launch of an AWS Region in New Zealand is a pivotal moment. This investment in digital infrastructure and Amazon’s commitment to digital capabilities can supercharge New Zealand tech companies and help New Zealanders secure highly sophisticated, secure, and well-paid tech jobs that exist across the economy, in tech companies, and across a variety of sectors, including agriculture, finance, retail, professional services, government, and many more,” said Graeme Muller, CEO of NZTech.

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• The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region consists of three Availability Zones at launch, representing 120 Availability Zones for AWS, spread across 38 AWS Regions globally.
• With today’s announcement, AWS is planning 10 additional Availability Zones and three new AWS Regions, in Chile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
• The AWS New Zealand Region is sovereign by design, just as the AWS Cloud has been from the beginning.
• AWS offers the most comprehensive portfolio of services, including analytics, compute, content delivery, databases, generative AI, machine learning, networking, storage, and other cloud technologies.
• To support the growth of cloud adoption in Asia Pacific, Amazon continues to invest in developing the skills of students, local developers and technical professionals, and the next generation of New Zealand IT leaders through programs such as AWS Academy , AWS Educate , and AWS Skill Builder . Through a Memorandum of Understanding with the New Zealand Government, Amazon is committed to training 100,000 people in New Zealand in cloud skills and has already provided training to more than 50,000 people. As part of this contribution to digital skills development, AWS will hire and train additional local staff to support the new AWS New Zealand Region.
• New Zealand organizations that have chosen AWS to manage their workloads include, among others, AMP New Zealand, AsureQuality, Contact Energy, Education Perfect, Foodstuffs South Island, Halter, Kiwibank, MATTR, Mercury NZ, Les Mills, Ministry of Transport, Mitre 10 New Zealand, New Zealand Post, One New Zealand, Sharesies, Steel & Tube Holdings, Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, TradeMe, TVNZ, University of Auckland, Vector, Wellington City Council, and Xero.
• AWS Partners in New Zealand include Arcanum, CustomD, CyberCX, Datacom, Deloitte, The Instillery, Lancom, MongoDB, and Westcon-Comstor.
• Amazon has committed to becoming a more sustainable company and achieving net-zero emissions across its operations by 2040 as part of the Climate Pledge. Amazon co-founded the Climate Pledge and became its first signatory in 2019.
• AWS’s Asia Pacific (New Zealand) region will be powered by renewable energy from the outset, thanks to a long-term wind farm project at Turitea South, in collaboration with Mercury NZ. This project supports the development of renewable energy capacity in New Zealand and enables Amazon to advance its sustainability goals. This partnership with AWS customer Mercury NZ demonstrates how digitalization and decarbonization can work together to achieve a sustainable future in New Zealand.

Amazon investment in New Zealand

The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region is Amazon’s latest investment in New Zealand to provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies.

• In 2016, AWS improved New Zealand’s connectivity to the AWS global network by establishing various high-capacity submarine cable connections , to improve network reliability and performance for customers.
• In 2020, AWS launched two Amazon CloudFront edge sites in Auckland. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network that accelerates the delivery of data, video, applications, and APIs to users worldwide, with low latency and high throughput.
• In 2023, AWS established an AWS Direct Connect site in Auckland, allowing customers to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data center, office, or co-location location.
• In 2023, AWS expanded its infrastructure in New Zealand with the launch of an AWS Local Zones site in Auckland. AWS Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that positions compute, storage, databases, and other specific services closer to large populations, industries, and data centers, enabling customers to deliver applications that need to deliver sub-10 millisecond latency to end users.
• Amazon estimates that the continued operation of the new AWS Region will add approximately NZ$10.8 billion annually to New Zealand’s gross national product (GNP) and support an average of more than 1,000 full-time jobs, including site maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other external services.

A secure, reliable and energy-efficient cloud infrastructure

AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in distinct geographic locations. Availability Zones are far enough apart to ensure customer business continuity, yet close enough to provide low latency for highly available applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected by redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones for even greater fault tolerance.

AWS is continually looking for ways to increase the energy efficiency of its data centers by optimizing data center designs, investing in custom-developed chips, and introducing innovative cooling technologies. An Accenture report , commissioned by AWS, estimates that AWS infrastructure is 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises infrastructure, and when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99%.

The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region will enable customers with data residency preferences or requirements to securely store their content in New Zealand, enabling them to achieve even lower latency and meet the demand for cloud services in Asia Pacific. Customers, from startups to enterprises, governments, and nonprofits, will be able to use the world’s leading cloud technology to drive innovation, reduce costs, and accelerate transformation.

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