Amazon is expanding its data centers to South Korea with the aim of opening a new region Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) in the area come early 2016.
With 11 AWS regions currently present worldwide, the new South Korean region will become the company's 12th global center and its fifth in the Asia Pacific area. Amazon plans to follow up its plans in South Korea with additional regions in India and Ohio in the same year.
The announcement was made in a blog post by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr who added that there are now a lot of AWS customers in Korea who have been pushing for the company to come up with a local region in order for them to gain increased proximity in storing and retrieving data. Some of these customers include startups such as Devsisters, IGAWorks and Beatpacking; top gaming companies such as Nexon, Gamevil and Wemade; and enterprises such as SM Entertainment, SK Planet and Samsung.
"The new region will allow service providers in Korea to build the next generation of SaaS applications and to make them available to customers all over the world. The new region will allow organizations outside of Korea to reach end users in the area with very low latency," wrote Barr.
Amazon launched its AWS business in 2006 and since then, has been expanding it gradually as a way to aggressively compete against the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Google in the booming cloud business. In 2013, the company announced opening a region in China while the plan to extend in Germany followed the year after.
AWS' third quarter earnings of the year have reportedly reached $2.08 billion with a year over year increase of 78 percent.
Amazon added that the new data centers in South Korea will also pave the way for the business to gain new customers that will include government agencies, educators, large enterprises and more startups which require data to be kept exclusively in South Korea.
Amazon did not disclose the cost of building a new data center although analysts are speculating that such regions, with all the data centers involved and scattered across a city, should reach hundreds of millions of dollars.
