The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region consists of three Availability Zones and offers an in-country infrastructure for customers to comply with data-residency and regulatory requirements.
The tech giant planned to invest A$6.8 billion in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region from 2022-2037, estimated to support an annual average of over 2,500 full-time equivalent jobs at external businesses, and add A$15.9 billion to the Australian gross domestic product by 2037
AWS says services available from the Melbourne region include “compute, storage, networking, business applications, developer tools, data analytics, security, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Its also committed to driving economic development in Victoria and Australia by investing in infrastructure, jobs, and education in local communities.
AWS has invested more than A$8 billion in infrastructure and jobs in Australia since the 2012 launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, and further committed to ongoing investment in local infrastructure to drive rapid customer innovation.
A large number of Australian companies are amongst the many active clients of AWS which operate in more than 190 countries. Businesses in Australia utilize AWS to innovate and hasten the time needed to get to the market. Customers who are relying on AWS range from:
- Airtasker
- Youfoodz
- Animal Logic
- ANZ Bank
- Atlassian
- Canva
- Cochlear
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia
- Jim’s Group
- Kmart
- Lion
- Lovisa
- National Australia Bank
- Optus
- PEXA Grou
- Pizza Hut
- Smiling Mind
- Swimming Australia
- Target
- Telstra
- Ticketek
- Woodside Energy.
AWS commits to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040
As part of The Climate Pledge, Amazon says its commited to reduce its carbon footprint to zero by 2040, and has taken the initiative to reach 100% renewable energy utilization by 2025, five years prior to the initially set target of 2030.
To date, Amazon is the world’s top corporate consumer of renewable energy, having achieved 85% renewable energy consumption in 2021.
Furthermore, Amazon plans to be “water positive” by 2030, meaning that it will give back more water than it uses for its own activities.
There are three renewable energy investments in Australia, a wind farm in Hawkesdale, Victoria and two solar farms in New South Wales – Gunnedah and Suntop.
Once all three projects become functional, it is estimated that they will generate 717,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy yearly, which is equivalent to the energy required for 115,000 Australian households.
Before the launch of the new Melbourne Zone there was a total of 29 Local Zones globally—17 in the US, 2 in LATAM (Buenos Aires and Santiago), 4 across Asia (Bangkok, Delhi, Kolkata, and Taipei), 5 in EMEA (Copenhagen, Hamburg, Helsinki, Muscat, and Warsaw), and 1 in Australia (Perth)
The Perth local zone was announced earlier this month.