AWS announces plans for infrastructure region in Aotearoa NZ in 2024

SECTOR UPDATE - AWS

The new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) and join the existing 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic AWS Regions at launch. The Region will be owned and operated by a local AWS entity in New Zealand. 

The new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations to run their applications and serve end users from data centres located in New Zealand, ensuring that customers who want to keep their data in New Zealand are able to do so. 

AWS also released an economic impact study (EIS) that estimates it will create 1,000 new jobs through investment of NZ$7.5 billion in the new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region with an estimated economic impact on Aotearoa’s GDP of NZ$10.8 billion over the next 15 years. 
 
“AWS supports thousands of organisations across New Zealand in their drive to innovate, succeed, and grow globally. AWS Cloud technology is providing new ways for government to further engage with citizens, for enterprises to innovate for their next phase of growth, and for entrepreneurs to build businesses and compete on a global scale,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO, AWS. 

“Our investments reflect AWS’s deep and long-term commitment to Aotearoa. We are excited to build new world-class infrastructure locally, train New Zealanders with in-demand digital skills, and continue to help local organisations deliver applications that accelerate digital transformation and fuel economic growth.”
 
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will enable local customers with data residency preferences to securely store data in New Zealand, while providing even lower latency across the country. 
 
According to the newly released EIS, AWS plans to invest NZ$7.5 billion in Aotearoa over the next 15 years through the new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region, which includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centres, operational expenses such as ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses. 

The EIS estimates that spending on construction and operation of AWS infrastructure in Aotearoa is expected to increase New Zealand’s GDP by approximately NZ$10.8 billion over the next 15 years. The EIS also establishes that the new AWS Region should bring direct and indirect economic benefits like new employment and sales for the data centre supply chain and related sectors. In total, an estimated 1,000 new full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs will be created in Aotearoa from this investment.
 
Customers and AWS Partners welcome the news of the AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region
Customers in New Zealand will continue to join the millions of active customers using AWS every month in over 190 countries around the world. New Zealand organisations choose AWS to run their workloads to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time to market, including Air NZ, ANZ Bank, Bank of New Zealand (BNZ), Contact Energy, Education Perfect, Halter, New Zealand Department of Conservation, Lancom, New Zealand Ministry of Health, New Zealand Ministry of Justice, Orion Health, Sharsies, The Clinician, TVNZ, UneeQ, University of Auckland, Vodafone, Xero, and many more.
  
The Clinician is a digital health company with a cloud-native health platform, ZEDOC, that automates collection and analysis of healthcare data and delivers multimedia educational materials to patients. Medical staff use the real-time data, such as eConsent, history, patient measures, and blood pressure and oxygen levels, to quickly flag symptoms such as depression from hypertension or an intolerance to medication. 

“ZEDOC uses AWS’s analytics and machine learning services to intelligently analyse hundreds of thousands of patient interactions every month, providing critical new insights for enhancing remote patient engagement and ensuring equitable access for all communities,” said Tamaryn Hankinson, co-founder of The Clinician. 

“AWS has enabled us to easily scale for public sector deployments in places like Singapore with strict health data privacy standards. An AWS Region in New Zealand will enable the expansion of our digital health services across the private and public health sector locally, ensuring we respect the data sovereignty needs of all communities.”

Source: AWS media release

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