Amazon has launched the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, giving customers the ability to run workloads and store data locally while serving users with lower latency.
The new AWS Region consists of three Availability Zones, taking the company’s global infrastructure to 120 Availability Zones across 38 Regions. Amazon said it plans to add another 10 Availability Zones and three more Regions in Chile, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
The company originally planned to build three Amazon-owned data centres near Costco in Westgate, open by 2024. The project, codenamed Project Wētā, failed to meet its initially projected 2024 launch date and it emerged that work on the site – spanning around 3.9 hectares and cleared, including draining two artificial wetlands – had stalled.
Local media reports at the time said the delay was primarily tied to unresolved stormwater consent issues. Amazon’s resource consent application was paused by Auckland Council in September 2023 because the stormwater discharge design did not meet regulatory standards under the Totara Creek Integrated Catchment Management Plan. According to Newsroom, Amazon has effectively abandoned the West Auckland site. The cleared land, once intended for their own three data centres, is now an empty, featureless site.
Importantly, Amazon’s public announcement of the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region did not involve infrastructure at this location. Instead, the company established its availability zones by deploying into existing data centre facilities owned by other providers. This has led independent cloud operators to question just how sovereign the new Region is.
Sovereign-by-design
Amazon is sticking to its guns saying it still expects to invest more than NZ$7.5 billion in New Zealand over the coming years to build, connect, operate, and maintain the new facilities. The company estimates the ongoing operation of the Region will contribute around NZ$10.8 billion to New Zealand’s gross domestic product and support an average of more than 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs annually in areas such as engineering, telecommunications, and facility maintenance.
The New Zealand Region is described as “sovereign-by-design,” a continuation of AWS’s approach to data residency. It will run on renewable energy from the outset through a long-term agreement with Mercury NZ, covering power from the Turitea South wind farm.
AWS has been expanding its presence in New Zealand for several years. In 2016, it improved connectivity by adding subsea cable capacity. In 2020, it launched two CloudFront edge locations in Auckland, followed in 2023 by an AWS Direct Connect site and a Local Zone in the city.
To support skills development, AWS has committed to training 100,000 people in cloud skills in New Zealand under a Memorandum of Understanding with the government. More than 50,000 people have been trained so far through programmes including AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder. The company said it will also employ additional staff to operate and support the new Region.
Organisations using AWS in New Zealand include AMP New Zealand, Kiwibank, Ministry of Transport, New Zealand Post, One New Zealand, TVNZ, University of Auckland, Wellington City Council, and Xero. Local partners working with AWS include Datacom, Deloitte, The Instillery, CyberCX, and Accenture.
Amazon is expected to reveal further details about its market approach including addressing its rationale for abandoning the site, as described in local media.