Amazon Web Services has officially launched its AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region as part of its overall commitment to invest more than US$5 billion in the country up to 2037.
The new cloud region – which was launched on Tuesday – comprises three interconnected Availability Zones, which AWS said are spaced out far enough to ensure business continuity but close enough to each other to enable low latency for bandwidth-hungry applications that use multiple zones. Each zone has its own power, cooling, and physical security.
AWS said the new Thailand region will enable customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Thailand, achieve lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia.
The Thailand region – which has been in the works since October 2022 – builds on Amazon’s previous cloud and data centre investments in Thailand, which include six Amazon CloudFront edge locations, AWS Outposts to deliver AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location, and AWS Local Zones in Bangkok.
“This new AWS Region in Thailand will help customers across all industries deploy advanced applications with a broad set of AWS technologies that offer both core cloud capabilities, such as compute, storage, analytics, and networking, and services that enable customers to rapidly evolve, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of infrastructure services at AWS, in a statement.
AWS also said the construction and ongoing operation of the new region will add an estimated US$10 billion to Thailand’s GDP and support an average of over 11,000 full-time-equivalent jobs at external businesses annually as part of the the AWS supply chain in the country.
The Thailand region is the fourth to be launched by AWS in Southeast Asia, following Singapore, Indonesia, and last year’s launch in Malaysia. AWS says it now has 111 Availability Zones across 35 geographic regions, with another 15 zones and five more AWS Regions in in the pipeline for Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
The launch of the AWS region comes as Thailand competes with neighbouring countries to establish itself as a digital data centre hub for Southeast Asia under the government’s “Cloud First initiative”.
Microsoft announced in May 2024 it would build its first data centre region in Thailand. Google first announced plans to build a cloud region in Thailand in August 2022. In October last year, Equinix announced it would invest around US$500 million in Thailand over the next ten years, starting with two new IBX data centres in Bangkok.