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AWS announces new region in the Land of the Long White Cloud – New Zealand

Hopes three availability zones will be hobbit-forming for local businesses and government agencies

Amazon Web Services has announced it will build a Region in New Zealand and light it up by the year 2024.

The forthcoming Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will feature three availability zones - a configuration AWS rarely exceeds.

The cloud colossus has said it will spend US$5.3 billion in New Zealand over the next 15 years, some of which will be capital expenditure on its new bit barns.

True to form, it hasn't said where they'll be. Wherever AWS chooses to build its facilities, it faces the challenge of building in the Auckland Volcanic Field. GeoNet, an initiative of New Zealand's Earthquake Commission, describes the region as home to over 53 recognised volcanic centres and as "young and still active" despite recording no eruptions for 600 years.

"An eruption in the Auckland Volcanic Field is a low probability event on human timescales but would have high consequences," the agency states.

For now, AWS is looking only 15 years into the future, during which time the cloudy concern thinks it will do all sorts of wonderful things for New Zealand's economy and local users. Indeed, the Auckland Region has been billed as a boon for locals, but not pitched as a handy destination for other AWS users looking for extreme geographic redundancy by using what will be one of just four regions in the Southern Hemisphere. The others are in Australia, South Africa, and Brazil.

AWS also has a stake in the Hawaiki Submarine Cable, which connects New Zealand to the USA and boasts 67Tb/sec capacity.

The new AWS region will have at least one local hyperscale rival, as Microsoft has announced an Azure region in Auckland, but not when it will open. ®

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