Amazon has officially launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, significantly expanding its global cloud infrastructure footprint. The new region will enable developers, enterprises, startups, and organisations across various sectors—including education, entertainment, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and the nonprofit space—to run applications with reduced latency and meet data residency requirements by hosting content within Taiwan.
In support of this long-term initiative, Amazon has committed to investing more than USD 5 billion to build, connect, operate, and maintain its data centres in Taiwan. The launch marks a key milestone in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) global infrastructure expansion, bringing the total to 117 Availability Zones across 37 regions worldwide. The Taipei Region comprises three Availability Zones, and AWS has plans to add 13 more zones and four additional regions in Chile, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS, stated that the new region will empower organisations of all sizes to scale confidently using AWS’s extensive portfolio of cloud services. These include compute, storage, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence, all while maintaining compliance with local regulations. Kalyanaraman added that the infrastructure is designed to deliver single-digit millisecond latency, enhancing user experiences and accelerating innovation.
Taiwan’s Premier, Mr Jung-tai Cho, welcomed the investment, noting that it underscores Taiwan’s vital role in the global supply chain and reinforces the country’s collaboration with AWS. He expressed optimism that the initiative would support national efforts in digital transformation and foster innovation in cloud computing and emerging technologies.
Amazon’s latest launch builds upon a decade of infrastructure development in Taiwan. Since 2014, AWS has introduced Amazon CloudFront edge locations and AWS Direct Connect sites in Taipei, in addition to launching AWS Outposts in 2020 and AWS Local Zones in 2022. The new Taipei Region is sovereign-by-design and aims to meet the most stringent requirements for security, reliability, and performance.
The region will benefit local organisations such as TSMC, Acer, Trend Micro, Cathay Financial Holdings, Chunghwa Telecom, and Yahoo! TW Ecommerce, among others. AWS Partners in Taiwan include CKmates, eCloudvalley, Going Cloud, MetaAge Corporation, Netron Ltd., and NextLink Technology.
Amazon is also investing in talent development through programmes like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder. To date, over 200,000 individuals in Taiwan have received cloud training, contributing to the nine million trained across Asia Pacific and Japan since 2017. AWS plans to further expand its local workforce to support the new region.
The company continues to pursue its sustainability goals, with AWS data centres engineered for energy efficiency through innovations in design, purpose-built chips, and cooling technologies. A study by Accenture estimates AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more energy-efficient than traditional on-premises data centres, with potential carbon footprint reductions of up to 99% when workloads are optimised on AWS.
With the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, customers across Asia Pacific can now leverage world-class infrastructure to meet increasing demand for secure, reliable, and low-latency cloud services, helping drive growth, efficiency, and innovation in a digitally transforming region.
-BusinessWire
