As part of its long-term commitment, AWS is planning to invest more than $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans to launch an AWS infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia in 2026.
AWS said in a release that the new infrastructure region will give local developers, startups, entrepreneurs and enterprises greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in Saudi Arabia. As part of its long-term commitment, AWS is planning to invest more than $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia.
“This 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,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services at AWS.
The new AWS region will consist of three availability zones at launch, adding to the existing 105 availability zones across 33 geographic regions globally. With this announcement, 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.
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The company explained that 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 of these zones has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks, the company added.
As part of this investment commitment, AWS will establish two new innovation centers and provide startups in the Middle East and North Africa with technical mentorship and trainings on AWS technologies such as AI and ML. AWS will also make grants available to fund graduate student research and provide free AWS Skill Builder subscriptions for up to 4,000 individuals working for small and medium enterprises established in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
In December 2023, AWS had launched its second infrastructure region in Canada. With the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region, AWS noted it was the first major cloud services provider to open an infrastructure region in Western Canada.
Some of the company’s active customers in Canada include Bell Canada, BlackBerry, Calgary Sports and Entertainment, CI Financial, the National Hockey League (NHL), Natural Resources Canada, Neo Financial, Nutrien, RBC, SECURE, Sun Life, TELUS and University of Calgary, among others.