Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to launch an AWS infrastructure Region in Malaysia. The new AWS Region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations, greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located here.
As part of its commitment to the region, AWS said in a statement that is planning to invest US$6 billion (approx. RM25.5 billion) in Malaysia by 2037.
“AWS has committed to the largest international technology investment to date in Malaysia, which will advance our Malaysia Madani vision of a highly skilled, innovative, prosperous, and sustainable economy,” said Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, Prime Minister of Malaysia.
“Bringing access to world-class AWS infrastructure, advanced technologies, and cloud skills programs to Malaysia will unlock opportunities for local businesses of all sizes to build and expand globally, cultivate a highly skilled workforce, spur new job creation, and deliver long-term economic growth.
“Today’s announcement is a vote of support for Malaysia’s leadership in the global digital economy, and we look forward to deepening our collaboration with AWS to advance our nation’s cloud-first ambitions.”
“The new AWS Region reflects our deep and long-term commitment to customers and organizations in Malaysia, as well as our commitment to serving sizeable and fast-growing demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia. We are proud to support Malaysia’s digital transformation with the highest levels of security and reliability available on AWS cloud infrastructure,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS.
“We look forward to helping Malaysian institutions, startups, and companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country and to spur job creation, skills training, and educational opportunities in the communities surrounding our data centers.”
The new AWS Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, adding to the existing 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic regions globally. With today’s announcement, AWS has plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions including Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand.
AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations, with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet 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. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones and across multiple Regions to achieve even greater fault tolerance.
The new AWS Region will enable customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Malaysia, enable customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia.
Customers from startups to enterprises to government organizations and nonprofits will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud to drive innovation. AWS offers the broadest and deepest portfolio of services, including analytics, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, storage, and other cloud technologies.
Commitment to sustainability
As part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040 and is on a path to powering operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of the original 2030 target.
In 2022, Amazon set a new corporate record for the most renewable energy announced by a single company in one year and remains the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy—a position it has held since 2020.
Amazon now has 401 renewable energy projects globally, including 164 wind farms and solar farms, and 237 rooftop solar projects on Amazon facilities. Once operational, Amazon’s global renewable energy projects are expected to generate 56,881 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of clean energy each year.
Additionally, AWS will be water positive by 2030, returning more water to communities than it uses in its direct operations. For more information about AWS Global Infrastructure, visit aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure.
