Amazon announced the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific(Taipei) Region. The new AWS Region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as education, entertainment, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and nonprofit organizations, greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from AWS data centers located in Taiwan, ensuring that customers who want to keep their content onshore can do so.
As part of its long-term commitment, Amazon is planning to invest more than $5 billion to support the construction, connection, operation, and maintenance of its data centers in Taiwan.
“The new AWS Asia Pacific(Taipei) Region will enable organizations of all sizes to build and scale with confidence using our comprehensive suite of cloud services, ranging from foundational compute and storage to advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, all while meeting local data residency requirements,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS.
“Organizations across Taiwan, and across Asia Pacific, can now leverage the same global infrastructure that millions of businesses worldwide rely on, while benefitting from single-digit millisecond latency, to accelerate innovation, increase operational efficiency, drive business growth, and deliver better experiences for their end users.”
“We appreciate the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific(Taipei) Region, which shows Amazon’s strong commitment to Taiwan,” said Mr. Jung-tai Cho, Premier of Taiwan.
“This investment also recognizes Taiwan as a pivotal partner in the global supply chain, and demonstrates the solid foundation of the collaboration between AWS and Taiwan. We are pleased to see AWS deepen its joint efforts with the Taiwan government and the industry to accelerate digital transformation and promote cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies. We look forward to contributing to fostering a robust digital ecosystem together to advance the technological innovation globally.”
AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Availability Zones are located 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 even greater fault tolerance.
AWS is constantly working on ways to increase the energy efficiency of its data centers—optimizing data center design, investing in purpose-built chips, and innovating with new cooling technologies.
A report by Accenture, commissioned by AWS, estimates AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises, and when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99%.
The AWS Asia Pacific(Taipei) Region will enable customers with data residency preferences or requirements to store their content securely in Taiwan, enable customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Asia Pacific.