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Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be investing US$4.5 billion in Australia by 2037 after taking the wrappers off its second Australian infrastructure Region in Melbourne.
The newly-launched Region is estimated to support an average of more than 2,500 full time jobs annually through a planned investment of more than US$4.5 billion (approximately A$6.8 billion) in Australia by 2037.
The investment includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centres, operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility costs and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses.
These jobs, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications and other jobs within the country’s broader economy, will be part of the AWS supply chain in Australia. The construction and operation of the Region is also estimated to add approximately US$10.6 billion (approximately A$15.9 billion) to Australia’s GDP by 2037.
“Australia has a strong history of technical innovation and the launch of a second AWS Region in Australia provides even greater resilience and enables more customers to develop cloud-based applications that help fuel economic development across the country,” AWS vice president of infrastructure services Prasad Kalyanaraman said.
“The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region adds to our ongoing infrastructure expansion and investments in Australia since we launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012.
“We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS partners.”
Customers will have more options to run workloads with increased resilience and availability, securely store data in Australia and serve end users with reduced latency.
With the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, AWS now has 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic regions, with announced plans to launch 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand and Thailand.
The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region consists of three Availability Zones.
“We know how important access to secure cloud infrastructure is to Victorian businesses and providing more choice will deliver a boost to the economy, support innovation and help to create new jobs locally,” Victorian Minister for Trade and Investment Tim Pallas.
Cevo is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner that provides cloud services such as migration, data analytics and managed services to Australian companies including David Jones, Insignia Financial, MYOB and Jim’s Group.
“Working with AWS has enabled us to expand our team by more than 60 consultants in the past 12 months to meet increased customer demand for deploying highly-regulated cloud environments,” Cevo CEO James Lewis said.
“As cloud adoption continues to scale, we’re seeing more customers—particularly in the financial, government and retail sectors—move to the cloud to tap into advanced modernization and analytics capabilities to ideate, design and build new customer-focused services.
“With the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, we can enable customers to drive more experimentation at scale, while providing assurance that their data is stored securely in Australia.”
Customers using AWS include Airtasker, Animal Logic, ANZ Bank, Atlassian, Canva, Cochlear, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Jim’s Group, Kmart, Lion, Lovisa, National Australia Bank, Optus, PEXA Group, Pizza Hut, Smiling Mind, Swimming Australia, Target, Telstra, Ticketek, Woodside Energy and Youfoodz.
“We plan to deploy our AWS targeted workloads and applications through the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region on day one and want to make it our long-term primary AWS location,” ANZ group executive of technology Gerard Florian said.
“The lower latency and higher performance we expect of the new AWS Region in Melbourne will help us improve our customer experience and accelerate our cloud adoption.”
Meanwhile, Australian public sector customers include FrontierSI, Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), University of Melbourne and Victorian Land Registry Services.
Australian start-ups, including Brighte, FloodMapp, FrankieOne, Illuvium, Law On Earth, Littlepay, Mr Yum, Omniscient Neurotechnology (o8t), Reejig and Swoop Aero, are also building their businesses with the use of AWS to rapidly scale nationally and globally.
Littlepay is a Melbourne-based financial technology company that works with more than 250 transport and mobility providers to enable contactless payments on local buses, city networks and national public transport systems.
“Our mission is to create a universal payment experience around the world, which requires world-class global infrastructure that can grow with us,” Littlepay CEO Amin Shayan said.
“To drive a seamless experience for our customers, we ingest and process over 1 million monthly transactions in real time using AWS, which enables us to generate insights that help us improve our services.”
