AWS has become the second major cloud giant to set up a new region in Thailand, as part of $5 billion investment in the country over the next 15 years.
The new Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region is set to help customers with data residency preferences or requirements to securely store data in the country, while providing even lower latency.
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The cloud company hopes that the new region will also help developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations, to run their applications and serve end users from domestic AWS data centres.
The new region will be made up of three availability zones, which place the infrastructure in different geographic locations to reduce the risk of an event affecting a customers’ business continuity. The new zones will add to AWS’s existing 87 zones across 27 geographic regions.
This will be the second cloud region from a major provider to open in Thailand, following Google Cloud's announcement last August.
As part of its commitment to the region, AWS also plans to invest around $5 billion in the country over the next 15 years. It also plans to continue to invest in upskilling local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in Thailand through programs like AWS re/Start, AWS Academy, and AWS Educate.
“We are committed to supporting Thailand's digital transformation through our local infrastructure investments and fast pace of innovation, helping Thailand-based customers unlock the full potential of the cloud to transform the way businesses and institutions serve their stakeholders,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS.
Globally, AWS has now announced plans for 24 more availability zones across eight more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and Thailand.
“AWS’s plan to build data centres in Thailand is a significant milestone that will bring advanced cloud computing services to more organisations and help us deliver our Thailand 4.0 ambition to create a digitised, value-based economy,” said Supattanapong Punmeechaow, deputy prime minister of Thailand and minister of Energy.
AWS is following in the footsteps of fellow cloud rival Google Cloud, who announced in August 2022 it was launching a new cloud region in Thailand, as well as Malaysia and New Zealand. It said at the time that the new cloud regions represented its ongoing commitment to support digital transformation across the Asia Pacific.
Other cloud giants have also set up data centres in the country, with Alibaba Cloud announcing in May 2022 it was launching its first data centre in Thailand to bolster local businesses’ digital innovation capabilities. Tencent also launched its second data centre in the country in June 2021 to address growing business needs, a whole year before the rest.
Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t announced any plans to open a data centre region in the country. Its closest infrastructure is based in Singapore and Hong Kong, although it announced in April 2021 it was planning to open a new region in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
