AWS Pouring Billions Into European Expansion, New Cloud Regions

Cloud giant AWS launches a new cloud region and data centers in Spain, with plans to invest $2.5 billion in the region.

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Amazon Web Services is pouring billions into expanding its cloud reach in Europe including today’s official launch of a new cloud region and data centers in Spain.

The Seattle-based $82 billion cloud giant will invest a whopping $2.5 billion in Spain over the next ten years.

Just this month, AWS also launched a new cloud region in Switzerland with plans to invest nearly $6 billion in the country over the next 14 years.

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“We’re opening a new AWS Region [in Spain] to provide our European customers the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection available as they innovate in the cloud,” said AWS’ CEO Adam Selipsky (pictured) on Twitter.

Additionally, AWS is currently developing more AWS cloud regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand and Thailand, which will amount to billions more of investment in these regions.

[Related: Amazon, Microsoft, Google Own 76% Of US Cloud Market]

AWS’ European Cloud Reach

AWS’ new Europe Spain Region consists of three Availability Zones and joins seven existing AWS European Regions in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, and Zurich.

AWS has had offices in Madrid since 2014 and in Barcelona since 2018 as the company has already made significant investments in education initiatives, training and startup enablement in Spain.

“Our investment in the AWS Europe (Spain) Region reflects AWS‘s long-term commitment to support the country’s economic development, job creation, and business growth,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS in a statement.

The new Spain AWS cloud region will provide customer applications that comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) access to another secure AWS Region in the European Union that helps meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection.

Applications running in the new cloud region can now use AWS instances, such as C5, M6g and T4g, as well as a slew of AWS services—from Amazon Aurora and CloudWatch to Amazon RDS and the AWS Marketplace.

“We are delivering on our promise to build new world-class infrastructure locally to help customers in Spain achieve the highest levels of security, availability, and resilience,” said AWS’ Kalyanaraman.

AWS Regions are composed 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—which consists of one or more data centers—has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.

Globally, AWS has 93 Availability Zones across 29 geographic regions with 18 new zones in the works across several AWS Regions.

AWS’ Cloud Market Share: 34 Percent

The move to invest billions in Europe this year comes as AWS continues to dominate the worldwide cloud services market.

As of third quarter 2022, AWS is the global market leader in cloud services, owning 34 percent share of the worldwide market, according to new data from Synergy Research Group.

Microsoft ranks No. 2 in worldwide cloud services market share at 21 percent, followed by Google Cloud at 11 percent share.

AWS captured $20.5 billion in revenue during its recent third quarter 2022, up 27 percent year over year.