Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of Amazon, is expanding its presence in Thailand with a new infrastructure region, which will be supported by a US$5 billion (190 billion Thai Baht) investment in the country over the next 15 years.
The new AWS Asia Pacific region, based in Bangkok, will consist of three availability zones, allowing developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations, to run their applications from AWS data centers located in Thailand, ensuring that customers who want to keep their data in Thailand can do so.
AWS has had 10 Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Bangkok since 2020. Amazon CloudFront is the company’s content delivery network that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, and applications with low latency and high transfer speeds. In 2020, AWS also launched AWS Outposts in Thailand. The offering is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location.
AWS did not give a date for the new Bangkok cloud region to go live. To date, AWS has 87 availability zones across 27 geographic regions globally, with plans to launch 24 more across eight new AWS regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and now Thailand.
AWS regions consist of availability zones that place infrastructure in “separate and distinct” geographic locations. Each availability zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through “redundant, ultra-low latency” networks.
“The AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) region will enable organizations to build with AWS technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, and Internet of Things,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services at AWS, in a press release.
Thai government officials welcomed the planned investment, with Narit Therdsteerasukdi, secretary general of the Thailand Board of Investment stating that the AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region will help boost the country’s global competitiveness.
“Cloud services are one of the most essential drivers of a digital economy. We welcome AWS’ plans to build a Region in Thailand, which will help advance our position as an innovation hub in Asia and a top destination for investment,” he said in a statement.
The regional expansion comes as AWS is dealing with a potential slowdown in growth. Despite profits rising 33% to $19.7 billion in its most recently reported quarterly results, the company said it expected profit margins to fluctuate due to potential recession, as well as investments in technology infrastructure and employee costs.
However, in a sign that despite the challenging economic climate, expanding regional investments remains a priority for cloud vendors, both Microsoft and Oracle have also announced plans to build new cloud regions in the coming fiscal year.