The launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s second cloud region in Melbourne, Australia, has been announced. The brand-new Asia-Pacific region, also known as ap-southeast-4) will have three Availability Zones and should assist customers in meeting regulatory and data residency requirements.
In December 2020, AWS made its initial plans to open the new Melbourne region public. By 2037, the company intends to invest $4.5 billion in the nation. More than 25,000 full-time job opportunities for locals are anticipated to be created annually in this AWS cloud region, which is expected to propel economic growth. Storage, compute, networking, developer tools, business applications, data analytics, security, and other services will be offered by it.
“Since we launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region in 2012, the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) region adds to our ongoing infrastructure expansion and investments in Australia. Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of Infrastructure Services at AWS, stated, “We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS Partners.”
Additionally, AWS has committed to going carbon-neutral by 2040. In addition, the business highlighted three projects that will support 115,000 Australian households by producing 717,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy annually.
Since 2017, AWS has announced a number of programs, such as AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Industry Quest, to train more than 200,000 Australian citizens in cloud computing skills. A new program called “Victorian Digital Skills” has been announced by the company to help people in the area get into higher-paying jobs.
In the meantime, in order to better compete with rivals like Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, AWS continues to invest in data centers. The new cloud region in Melbourne will join the Asia-Pacific region’s existing cloud regions. These include the Ningxia, Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Sydney, Seoul, Osaka, Jakarta, and Beijing regions.
AWS now operates 99 availability zones in 31 regions, with the Melbourne region now open for business. However, the company is constantly expanding its cloud footprint, with plans to establish 12 additional availability zones worldwide and four brand-new AWS regions for Thailand, Israel, New Zealand, and Canada.
AWS has confirmed that it will invest $35 billion in Virginia by 2040 to expand its current US-EAST-1 region, in addition to those plans. The company has stated that it will create approximately 1,000 new jobs as a result of the construction of multiple data centers throughout the state.
Plans of $4.5B investment
The infrastructure region, which is in Melbourne and consists of three availability zones, runs alongside another Sydney region, which has been operational since November 2012. In December 2020, plans for the Melbourne area were first announced.
AWS now has 99 availability zones across 31 countries, 12 of which are in Asia-Pacific, thanks to its addition. Thailand, New Zealand, Israel, and Canada are in the process of receiving 12 more zones and 4 more regions.
According to the US cloud vendor, each availability zone has its own power and cooling to meet business continuity needs. Infrastructure regions are in “separate and distinct” locations.
As part of the anticipated costs associated with the construction and operation of the Melbourne region, it was mentioned that the $4.5 billion investment would be used to support more than 2,500 full-time positions at external businesses annually. Construction, engineering, and telecommunications jobs, as well as the cost of utilities and facilities, would all fall under this category.
AWS stated that the new region’s construction and operation are anticipated to contribute $10.6 billion (AU$15.9 billion) to Australia’s GDP by 2037. ANZ Bank, Kmart, Pizza Hut, Ticketek, the University of Melbourne, and Victorian Land Registry Services are among its local customers.
AWS stated that it was on track to completely power its operations with renewable energy by 2025. The company as a whole has a goal of going net-zero carbon by 2040.
It has invested in three Australian initiatives that use renewable energy, including a wind farm in Victoria and two solar farms in New South Wales. The projects are expected to produce 717,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy annually when they are all operational, or enough power for nearly 115,000 local households.
In this region, Amazon is involved in 57 renewable energy initiatives, one of which is a ground-mounted solar system in Singapore that is anticipated to produce 80,000 megawatt hours of energy annually.
As part of a global rollout to add 22 locations, AWS announced plans in February to establish 10 local zones in Asia-Pacific. It said that the move to push cloud capabilities to the edge was in line with the growing demand from businesses for distributed service delivery and ultra-low latency. Auckland, Bangkok, Brisbane, and Bengaluru are among the six markets in the Asia-Pacific that would be covered by local zones.
Biggest Cloud Service Provider
Amazon Web Services is the global leader in terms of scale for Amazon.com’s cloud computing business. AWS had a 34 percent market share in the cloud infrastructure service market in the third quarter of 2022. This gives it a lot of economies of scale and lets it make pretty good margins.
AWS’s sales of $20.5 billion in the third quarter of 2022 represented 16% of Amazon.com’s total sales. The division made $5.4 billion in operating income, and its operating margin was 26.3%. Even though AWS’s Q3 results were lower than some estimates, many people still think the company has a lot of room for growth given the industry’s expected growth over the next few decades.
Indeed, Amazon Web Services is making significant investments for the future. The company recently announced that it will spend $35 billion by 2040 to expand its data centers in Virginia, which will result in the creation of 1,000 jobs.