Amazon Web Services has opened an eighth global center to serve cloud-computing customers, expanding to South America for the first time with a new computing region in Brazil.
The company says the new region, known as Sao Paulo, will improve speeds for end users in South America. On his blog, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says the new region “has been highly requested by companies worldwide,” and will help serve a fast-growing economic region.
“Local companies have not been the only ones to frequently ask us for a South American region, but also companies from outside South America who would like to start delivering their products and services to the South American market,” Vogels writes. “Many of these firms have wanted to enter this market for years but had refrained due to the daunting task of acquiring local hosting or datacenter capacity.”
The choice of Brazil for AWS highlights that country’s rise globally—it has designs on becoming the world’s fifth economic power. Vogels noted that “over the past 10 years, IT has risen to become 7% of the GDP in Brazil.”
This is the second addition in two months for AWS—the company added a new computing region in Oregon in November, pricing it at 10 percent lower than the Northern California region. That pricing put the Oregon region on par with the Viriginia-based AWS computing region, the site of an epic crash earlier this year.
