IMAGE CREDIT: Amazon Web Services
AWS to Invest $8.8 Billion Singapore’s Cloud Infrastructure
Aiming to meet the growing customer demand for cloud technology and services in Singapore, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it will invest an additional $8.8 billion into its existing cloud infrastructure in the country from 2024 to 2028.
AWS said that it has invested a total of $8.5 billion in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region through 2023. With the new investment, AWS’s total planned investment into its existing cloud infrastructure is set to double to more than $17 billion by 2028.
According to a new AWS Economic Impact Study (EIS), this new planned investment in addition to previous investment commitments is estimated to contribute $17.52 billion to Singapore’s GDP by 2028, and support an estimated average of 12,300 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in local Singapore businesses each year.
Priscilla Chong, country manager, Singapore at AWS, said that AWS plans to double down on its cloud infrastructure investments in Singapore from 2024 to 2028 to support customer demand, and help reinforce Singapore’s status as an attractive regional innovation launchpad, and a global leader in digital competitiveness.
This investment will create a ripple effect across Singapore by increasing economic growth and cloud adoption, Chong said.
AWS now has 105 availability zones across 33 geographic regions, with plans to create 18 more availability zones and six more AWS regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and the European sovereign cloud of AWS, which would be an independent cloud for Europe.
AWS regions are composed of availability zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Availability zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple availability zones, AWS said in a statement.
AWS to Support NAIS 2.0
AWS also announced that it will support Singapore’s Smart Nation and National AI Strategy 2.0 (NAIS 2.0) goals with a new flagship AI program dubbed “AWS AI Spring for Singapore.”
The company noted that this program is a multifaceted collaboration with Singapore’s government, public sector organizations and enterprises to help accelerate the adoption of AI and generative AI in Singapore.
“With AWS AI Spring, we are eager to embark on this collaborative AI journey with the Government and customers to unlock the potential of AI, and accelerate Singapore’s Smart Nation vision and goal to become a beacon in the international AI field,” said Elsie Tan, country manager for AWS Singapore’s public sector business.
Under AI Spring Public Sector, AWS will work closely with Singapore’s government agencies to enable and accelerate AI adoption within the public sector and local industries.
As part of AI Spring Enterprise, AWS also signed a Memorandum of Intent (MoI) with the Singapore telecom regulator IMDA to leverage Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Q to develop an AI adoption program for local enterprises to identify and scale AI for the most impactful use cases across their businesses.