Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it will launch an AWS infrastructure region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2026.
The new AWS Region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as healthcare, education, gaming, and nonprofit organizations, greater choices for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ensuring that customers who want to keep their content in-country can do so.
As part of its long-term commitment, AWS is also planning to invest more than $5.3 billion (approx. 19.88 billion Saudi riyals) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS, stated that, “The 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,” Kalyanaraman added.
The new AWS Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, adding to the existing 105 Availability Zones across 33 geographic regions globally. Further, AWS has plans to launch 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity but 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.
AWS offers the broadest and deepest portfolio of services, including analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning (ML), mobile services, storage, and other cloud technologies. Customers from startups to enterprises to public sector organizations and nonprofits will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud to drive innovation, meet data residency preferences, achieve lower latency, and serve the demand for cloud services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East.
“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,” said His Excellency Engineer Abdullah Alswaha, Saudi Arabia Minister of Communications and Information Technology.
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