Amazon Web Services to expand in two new geographic areas
Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to increase its presence in North America and the Middle East.
The hosted cloud services division of Amazon intends to launch AWS infrastructure regions in Mexico by early 2025 and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2026. The company has been making multibillion-dollar commitments to expand its cloud infrastructure both in the U.S. and globally in the past 12 months.
Details of its two latest geographic expansions follow:
Mexico
AWS will launch an AWS infrastructure region in Mexico by early 2025. The new AWS Mexico (Central) Region will be part of the company’s long-term commitment to Latin America, with planned investment of more than $5 billion in Mexico over the next 15 years.
The new AWS Region will consist of three availability zones at launch, adding to AWS’s existing 105 availability zones across 33 geographic regions globally. AWS regions consist of availability zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations, far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high-availability applications that use multiple availability zones.
Each availability zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple availability zones to achieve greater fault tolerance.
The AWS Mexico (Central) Region will enable customers with data residency preferences or requirements to store their content securely in Mexico, enable customers to achieve even latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Latin America. AWS will hire and develop additional local personnel to operate and support the new AWS region in Mexico.
“AWS is excited to see thousands of customers in nearly every industry across Mexico innovate and grow,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of infrastructure services at AWS. “Our investment in Mexico reflects AWS’s long-term commitment to customers so they can take advantage of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look forward to helping customers in Mexico meet data residency preferences and deliver cloud-based applications with low latency, accelerating the country’s digital transformation, and fueling economic growth.”
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
AWS will launch an AWS infrastructure region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2026. As part of its long-term commitment, AWS plans to invest more than $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia.
The new AWS Region will consist of three availability zones at launch, adding to the existing 105 availability zones (with three more planned to open in Mexico in 2025) across 33 geographic regions globally.
To support growth in cloud adoption across Saudi Arabia, AWS will continue to scale its training programs and help accelerate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goal of empowering women to increase participation in the workforce.
To help support this goal, AWS is launching a new upskilling program, "AWS Saudi Arabia Women’s Skills Initiative," in partnership with Skillsoft Global Knowledge. AWS will train up to 4,000 women on AWS cloud practitioner essentials, at no charge, through classroom trainings with AWS-certified professionals.
This initiative builds on an existing AWS commitment to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people around the world by 2025.
In addition, AWS will continue to invest in upskilling students, local developers and technical professionals, nontechnical professionals, and IT leaders in Saudi Arabia through a variety of offerings.
The company will also establish two new innovation centers and provide startups in the Middle East and North Africa with technical mentorship and trainings on AWS technologies such as AI and ML, as well as make grants available to fund graduate student research and provide higher education institutions with ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and in-demand cloud jobs.
Eleven higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia have incorporated AWS Academy courses into their curricula. And as part of Amazon’s continued effort upskilling women, the company launched a hiring program for female delivery associates in Saudi Arabia.
"Today’s announcement supports the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation with the highest levels of security and resilience available on AWS cloud infrastructure, helping serve fast-growing demand for cloud services across the Middle East," said Kalyanaraman. "The new AWS region will enable organizations to unlock the full potential of the cloud and build with AWS technologies like compute, storage, databases, analytics, and artificial intelligence, transforming the way businesses and institutions serve their customers."