Amazon‘s company, Amazon Web Services (AWS), on Wednesday May 26, announced that it plans to open an infrastructure region in the UAE in the first half of 2022. The new AWS Middle East (UAE) region will consist of three AWS centres, and become AWS’s second region in the Middle East after Bahrain. The new region will build upon AWS’s existing investment in the country, which includes two AWS Direct Connect locations and two Amazon CloudFront edge locations launched in 2018.
Peter DeSantis; Senior Vice President of global infrastructure, Amazon Web Services said that “We are excited to build on the great momentum of cloud adoption in the Middle East by providing more choice for customers in the UAE to run applications and store data locally. The new AWS Region supports the UAE’s focus on promoting technology innovation that has made it a thriving global hub for entrepreneurs, e-governments, and multi-national businesses. With the new region, organizations of all sizes will be able to innovate faster and serve end-users with even lower latency across the region.”
Amazon aims to continue to build teams of experts and skilled individuals to help customers transition to AWS. To foster entrepreneurship and the growth of new businesses in the UAE, AWS will be further expanding the AWS Activate programme to support the UAE’s startups and SMBs.
The new AWS centres will bring about improvements in infrastructure and enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in the UAE, while also providing even lower latency across the country.
Director General of the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO), Dr Tariq Bin Henri, commented on the development. “We welcome the upcoming AWS Region, which will bring advanced cloud infrastructure to the UAE. This comes in line with our goal of attracting investments that boost technology capabilities. We look forward to collaborating with AWS across the knowledge economy, including education initiatives, cloud skills training, and startup enablement programmes.”, he said.
Amazon Web Services globally has 80 availability zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch more AWS regions in other countries like Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, Switzerland.
