Amazon Web Services says it has secured the regulatory green light to go ahead with its 'infrastructure region' in New Zealand, part of its global 'cloud zone' with 32 zones built across 26 cities.
The Seattle-based cloud platform group and Amazon group subsidiary plans to spend $7.5 billion in constructing three datacentres in Auckland by 2024.
It estimates 1,000 jobs will be created and $10.8b added to the country's gross domestic product over the next 15 years.
AWS's offering extends to more than 200 services, including data storage, analytics and artificial intelligence. Its local customer base reads like a who's who of corporate NZ, including Air New Zealand, Education Perfect, the Ministry of Health, Sharesies, Vector and Xero.
Country manager for AWS commercial operations Tiffany Bloomquist said the Overseas Investment Office approval to build the 'region', would enable developers, startups and enterprises as well as government and non-profit agencies to run applications with "low latency" from NZ datacentres.
A report last July by 451 Research, the research arm of S&P Global Market Intelligence, said cloud computing is five times more energy efficient than on-premises datacentres.
Moving computing workloads from on-premises datacentres to the cloud can also reduce organisations' carbon footprint by more than 78%.
