AWS CEO: New $7.2B Israel Cloud Region Gives ‘Customers Greater Choice’

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky touts the opening of his company’s new cloud region and data centers in Israel as Amazon continues to invest billions in expansion.

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky is bullish on his company’s multibillion-dollar global data center expansion strategy and its new $7.2 billion investment in Israel that seeks to fuel cloud sales.

On Tuesday, AWS unveiled that it will invest $7.2 billion over the next 15 years in Israel as the cloud computing market share leader opens the doors to its new AWS Israel Cloud Region.

“The AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region is now open, giving customers greater choice for running their applications and securely storing data in Israel while serving end users with even lower latency,” said AWS’ CEO on LinkedIn.

[Related: Amazon’s AWS Q2 Earnings Preview: Cloud Sales, Profit And AI]

AWS’ data center investments in 2023 are reaching tens-of-billions of dollars. Amazon’s data centers power AWS cloud services and infrastructure.

For example, Amazon said this year it will invest $35 billion in building and expanding its data center footprint in Virginia over the next 17 years. Also this year, the company said it will invest nearly $13 billion in new data centers in India, in addition to a $6 billion investment in data centers in Malaysia.

“AWS has long been vested in India’s growth as a digital powerhouse, and I’m inspired to see how our infrastructure presence since 2016 has driven such tremendous progress,” said Selipsky in May. “We’re announcing additional planned investment of $12.7 billion for cloud infrastructure in India. That will bring our total investment to $16.4 billion by 2030—boosting the country’s GDP, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, and continuing to help customers innovate.”

Additionally, AWS received approval this year to spend billions on building five new data centers in Oregon.

AWS’ new Tel Aviv Region is now generally available with a total of three Availability Zones. The new region provides customers an additional option for running their applications and serving users from data centers located in Israel.

AWS now spans 102 Availability Zones in 32 geographic regions around the world. The company has plans for another 12 Availability Zones and four more regions in Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand and Thailand.

Amazon CEO Bullish On AWS

AWS is Amazon’s most profitable business, which is likely why the $514 billion technology giant is willing to spend billions each year on growing its market size.

Amazon generated $127.4 billion in sales during first quarter 2023 with operating income of $4.8 billion. In Q1 2023, AWS reported $5.1 billion in operating income, meaning AWS kept Amazon profitable during the quarter.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who was previously AWS’ longtime CEO, has consistently spotlighted AWS’ bright future. Just last week, Jassy touted AWS’ new generative AI solution, Amazon Bedrock.

“Amazon Bedrock is helping to democratize generative AI by giving customers access to best-in-class foundation models so they can experiment and innovate,” said Jassy on LinkedIn. “Today, we announced we’re adding new model provider Cohere and new foundation models from Anthropic and Stability AI.”

IT research firm Gartner expects worldwide IT spending to reach over $5.1 trillion in 2024, up from $4.7 trillion in 2023, and $4.5 trillion in 2022.

Amazon is set to report the financial results of its second quarter 2023 on Thursday.