Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revealed plans to launch an AWS infrastructure Region in Malaysia as it commits to investing $6 billion (approx. MYR 25.5 billion) in the country by 2037.
The new AWS Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, adding to the company’s existing 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic regions globally.
The AWS Availability Zones concept involves placing infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations, with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet close enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
Advancing ‘Malaysia Madani’
The new Malaysian AWS Region will enable startups, enterprises, government organizations and nonprofits with data residency preferences to store data locally, which also means lower latency. The Region will also serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia, AWS says.
Malaysia prime minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said the Malaysian AWS Region project is “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.”
The Malaysia announcement is part of a broader plan by AWS to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions – the other four being Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.
AWS has been investing heavily in Southeast Asia in the past couple of years. In October last year, AWS announced plans to invest $5 billion in Thailand over the next 15 years for its AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region, which includes three Availability Zones.
At the end of 2021, AWS officially opened its Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region, and announced an investment of $5 billion (Rp71.7 trillion) in Indonesia over the next 15 years.
AWS customers sing praises
AWS has a long list of big-name customers in Malaysia, including Astro Malaysia, Axiata Group, Bank Islam Malaysia, CelcomDigi, Johor Corporation and PETRONAS.
PayNet, the national real-time retail payments infrastructure network and shared central infrastructure for Malaysia’s financial market-segment, also uses AWS to run critical banking workloads, including its MyDebit cashless payments system.
“The launch of an AWS Region in Malaysia provides us with lower-latency access to cloud services to help ensure our customers have a seamless payments experience,” said Paynet group CEO Farhan Ahmad.
Telecoms player Maxis – which is one of AWS’ AWS Advanced Tier Services Partners – is also pleased, not least because it signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS in 2019 to deliver cloud technologies enabled by 4G.
“Maxis aspires to be the one-stop shop for all IT and connectivity services in Malaysia, and we see AWS as a key factor in helping us achieve this goal,” said Maxis CEO Goh Seow Eng.
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