Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to open an infrastructure region in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2024. 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. Globally, AWS has announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the new AWS Region 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.”
AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to help support customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. 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.
Customers from startups to enterprises to government organisations and nonprofits will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud to drive innovation. AWS offers the broadest and deepest portfolio of services including analytics, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, storage, and more. Customers in New Zealand already benefit from Amazon’s ongoing investment in its global backbone through the Hawaiki Submarine Cable, a 9,300 mile (15,000 kilometers) transpacific cable system in operation since 2018 that provides a low-latency and high-bandwidth connection from Australia to New Zealand and the United States.
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 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, Sharesies, The Clinician, TVNZ, UneeQ, University of Auckland, Vodafone, Xero and many more.
ANZ is New Zealand’s largest bank, holding a banking relationship with nearly one in two New Zealanders and employing approximately 8,000 people. “It’s fantastic to see AWS investing and developing their capabilities in New Zealand,” said Michael Bullock, CIO of ANZ New Zealand and Pacific.
“Our tech sector is world-class, and this sort of investment is a great step toward providing New Zealand with greater technical resilience and opportunities for innovation. This investment demonstrates AWS’s continuing commitment to its customers and to the New Zealand economy as a whole, while providing access to world-class cloud computing infrastructure that will meet our customers’ data sovereignty
preferences and desire for innovation.”
Air New Zealand is New Zealand’s national carrier with a global network of passenger and cargo services, flying more than 17 million passengers every year and 3,400 flights per week before the pandemic. “Air New Zealand strives to connect New Zealanders to each other and New Zealand to the world, and we aim to be the world’s leading digital airline by providing a seamless digital experience from the moment customers start planning their trip until after they return home,” said Greg Foran, CEO of Air New Zealand. “We have been using a wide range of AWS services since 2016 to differentiate the airline globally, grow, and evolve our business. These include storage, compute, databases, and application development to run more than 70 of the airline’s digital services applications. We have collaborated with AWS on many innovations to embed digital at the heart of everything we do, including building a secure digital booking system that easily scales to meet fluctuating demand. Looking ahead, we need strong, resilient cloud architecture to provide customers a more personalised and innovative digital experience. The new AWS infrastructure will help us deliver on our vision, provide customers even faster access to all our services, and underpin our delivery of a best-in-class digital experience to Kiwis for many years to come.”
The upcoming AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region expands on AWS’s ongoing investment in New Zealand since setting up the first local AWS entity (AWS New Zealand) in Auckland in 2014. AWS has also launched two Amazon CloudFront edge locations and AWS Outposts in Auckland. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any data centre, colocation space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. This year, AWS expanded its presence further, opening new offices for AWS New Zealand in Auckland and Wellington to support a growing team of more than 100 employees, including solutions architects, account managers, sales representatives, professional services consultants, and experts to help customers migrate workloads to the cloud.
