Amazon has opened the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, its first infrastructure region in the country, providing local organisations with more choice and lower latency for cloud services. The investment is expected to support over 1,000 jobs annually and contribute around NZ$10.8 billion to New Zealand’s economy.
Expanding cloud infrastructure in New Zealand
The new AWS Region consists of three Availability Zones, adding to Amazon’s global footprint of 120 Availability Zones across 38 Regions. Each zone is designed with independent power, cooling, and security to ensure high availability and resilience. The launch enables customers to store data locally in New Zealand, meet data residency requirements, and run applications with reduced latency.
Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS, said, “The new AWS Region in New Zealand will help serve the growing demand for cloud services across the country and empower organisations of all sizes to accelerate their digital transformation. With this launch, businesses can now leverage advanced AWS technologies, from core cloud capabilities to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all while meeting local data residency requirements.”
Graeme Muller, CEO of NZTech, added, “The launch of the AWS Region in New Zealand is an exciting moment. This investment in digital infrastructure and Amazon’s commitment to digital skills can accelerate New Zealand technology businesses and help New Zealanders to move into highly skilled, secure, and well-paid technology jobs—which exist right across the economy, from tech companies to various sectors including agriculture, finance, retail, professional services, government, and many more.”
Economic and digital skills investment
Amazon plans to invest more than NZ$7.5 billion in the country to build, connect, and operate the data centres. The company estimates the project will support over 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs each year, spanning roles in engineering, telecommunications, and maintenance.
The company has also pledged to upskill 100,000 people in cloud technology through training programmes such as AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder. More than 50,000 individuals in New Zealand have already received training under this initiative. Amazon has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the New Zealand government to advance this effort.
Local organisations using AWS include AMP New Zealand, Kiwibank, New Zealand Post, One New Zealand, TVNZ, the University of Auckland, Wellington City Council, and Xero. AWS partners in the country include Accenture, Deloitte, Datacom, and MongoDB, among others.
Driving sustainability and innovation
Amazon has committed to powering the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region with renewable energy from day one through a long-term partnership with Mercury NZ’s Turitea South wind farm. This supports the company’s broader sustainability goals, including achieving net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge.
AWS continues to invest in improving the efficiency of its infrastructure. According to a report commissioned by AWS, its infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than traditional on-premises systems. When workloads are optimised on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99 per cent.
The launch builds on earlier investments by AWS in New Zealand. These include subsea cable connections established in 2016 to improve global network reliability, CloudFront edge locations launched in 2020 to accelerate content delivery, and a Local Zones deployment in Auckland in 2023 to bring services closer to end users requiring ultra-low latency.
With the launch of its New Zealand Region, AWS aims to position the country as a hub for cloud innovation in Asia Pacific, helping businesses, government bodies, and non-profits to adopt digital technologies and accelerate transformation.
