Amazon reportedly to invest US$1bn in Chile astro datacenter

Amazon Web Services may announce in October plans to invest US$1bn in Chile in a new data processing center for the country's astronomical observatories, local daily El Mercurio reported, citing sources familiar with the process.

This investment would be followed by a second one in a datacenter for processing computing, storage, databases, analytics, IoT and business applications, which would, if true, end ongoing speculation about whether AWS will choose Chile or Argentina for its next Latin America datacenter, according to the report.

But this is not the first time a report appeared that confirmed Chile as Amazon's choice.

Earlier this month, several Latin American publications confused news that Amazon's e-commerce unit would set up a customer services center in Colombia for a decision to install the datacenter in that country instead of Chile or Argentina.

In a statement published by El Mercurio, AWS gave its usual response: "We constantly receive feedback from clients about which region they would like AWS to enter next and we have a long list of target countries that we are looking at.

"We are constantly re-evaluating and re-prioritizing that list and Argentina and Chile are only two of the many possibilities that we are currently studying. In time, you can expect to see AWS in many important countries and locations in the US and around the world."

That said, Teresa Carlson, AWS VP worldwide public sector, has confirmed in May the company's interest in the opportunities arising from Chile's astronomical industry – which has been growing in importance due to Chile's clear night skies in the Atacama.

In April, Telefónica lit a dedicated fiber optic network to carry data from atstronomical research centers.

Carlson and Jeffrey Kratz, AWS' general manager Canada, Latin America and Caribbean public sector sales, met with President Sebastián Piñera and economy minister José Ramón Valente to promote "long-term partnerships" and the use of cloud computing in the public sector.

Education is another area of interest. During the visit, AWS signed an agreement to provide a US$1.2mn grant to Chilean public university Universidad de Chile to be used for AWS cloud services.

Kratz told BNamericas that "there is a global hunger for the astronomical information that is being captured here. The telescopes are a national asset. Cloud helps the sharing of that and the advancement of science on a global basis."

Also, in July, President Piñera met with Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos during a visit to Silicon Valley.

DATACENTER FUROR

Chile has become the preferred destination for datacenter investments from a number of multinationals.

Google is reportedly due to open a US$140mn datacenter in Santiago's Quilicura district in two weeks, which will reportedly be attended by both President Piñera and Google's CEO Sundar Pichai.

This week, IP communications giant CenturyLink confirmed to BNamericas that its second datacenter in Chile was nearing completion.

Also, Latin American systems integrator Sonda recently told BNamericas it is building the country's first Tier IV datacenter.