AWS is going to start an infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia

The Amazon.com company, Amazon Web Services (AWS) (NASDAQ: AMZN), said today that it will establish an AWS infrastructure region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by the year 2026. With more options for running applications and serving end users from data centers located in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the new AWS Region will benefit developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises as well as healthcare, education, gaming, and nonprofit organizations. This will ensure that customers who wish to retain their content in-country can do so.

AWS intends to invest about $5.3 billion (around 19.88 billion Saudi riyal) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of its long-term commitment. Go to aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure for further details about AWS Global Infrastructure.

According to Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS, “Today’s announcement supports the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation with the highest levels of security and resilience available on AWS cloud infrastructure, helping serve fast-growing demand for cloud services across the Middle East.” “The new AWS Region will enable organizations to unlock the full potential of the cloud and build with AWS technologies like compute, storage, databases, analytics, and artificial intelligence, transforming the way businesses and institutions serve their customers. We look forward to helping Saudi Arabian institutions, startups, and enterprises deliver cloud-powered applications to accelerate growth, productivity, and innovation and spur job creation, skills training, and educational opportunities.”

His Excellency Engineer Abdullah Alswaha, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, said, “The partnership with AWS and their announcement of an AWS Region, backed by a $5.3 billion investment, ignites a new era of technological excellence and innovation for the Kingdom.” “This cloud Region demonstrates a firm commitment to research, innovation, and empowering entrepreneurs to achieve prosperity for our region and the world.”

The new AWS Regions will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, joining the existing 105 Availability Zones in 33 geographic regions around the world. With today’s announcement, AWS is launching 18 additional Availability Zones and 6 additional AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

AWS Regions are made up of availability zones that locate your infrastructure in geographically dispersed locations. Availability Zones are far enough apart to ensure business continuity for customers, but close enough to ensure low latency for highly available applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through a redundant, ultra-low-latency network. AWS customers who value high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones for even greater fault tolerance.