Hyderabad joins Mumbai as AWS expands its Asia Pacific presence
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Monday the general availability of its second region in India. The new Hyderabad region, located in the state of Telangana, is called ap-south-2 and has launched with three Availability Zones.
Regions represent the highest level of AWS’s global infrastructure. Regions are separate geographical areas where Amazon has located data centers. Availability Zones, or AZs, are logical groupings of data centers located close to one another. AWS customers can deploy apps to multiple AZs to achieve higher levels of redundancy and reliability.
“Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, and 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,” said AWS.
Amazon noted that the new Hyderabad region is the company’s 30th. This marks the second region for India; AWS has operated another Asia Pacific region in the Indian city of Mumbai since 2016. AWS’s global expansion continues apace with announced regions in Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand. Last week the company activated a new Spain region in the city of Aragón; earlier this month AWS also flipped the switch on a Zurich, Switzerland region.
AWS noted plans to invest US$4.4 billion in India through 2030 thanks to the new region. That number includes “capital expenditures on the construction of data centers, operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses,” said Amazon. The company also anticipates the creation of more than 48,000 full-time jobs at external businesses that will be part of AWS’s Indian supply chain – that includes construction, facility maintenance, engineering and telecommunications roles. AWS said the new region’s construction and operation will add about $7.6 billion to Indian’s gross domestic product by 2030.
Sustainability is another centerpiece of Amazon’s bolstered India operations. The company announced in September what it describes as “its first utility-scale renewable energy project” in the region, comprising three solar farms located in the Indian state of Rajasthan. “Once fully operational, these solar projects will have the combined capacity to generate 1,076,000 megawatt hours of renewable energy per year, enough to power more than 360,000 average-sized households in New Delhi annually,” said Amazon, which added that it has 57 renewable energy projects underway in the Asia Pacific region. Amazon said it’s the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. The company’s “Climate Pledge” would see it powering 100% of its operations with renewable energy; its initial pledge was to do so by 2030, but Amazon now plans to reach that goal by 2025, it said.
“We look forward to greener and more sustainable data centers to power India’s expanding economy,” said Shri Rajeev Chandrashekhar, union minister of state for Electronics and Information Technology and for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.
“The new Hyderabad Region gives customers an additional option for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in India. Customers with data-residency requirements arising from statutes, regulations, and corporate policy can run workloads and securely store data in India while serving end users with even lower latency,” wrote AWS Principal Developer Advocate Channy Yun.
