AWS expects strong growth from local zones in Argentina, Chile

Cloud service provider AWS anticipates strong growth stemming from its Buenos Aires development and the launch of its Santiago de Chile cloud region.

“There is a lot of opportunity,” Rafael Mattje de Carvalho, manager of AWS architecture solutions for the public sector in Latin America and the Caribbean, told BNamericas.

“We have several clients that are looking at local zones to make a migration of their mainframes viable,” he said about the Argentine market. This situation is especially prevalent in the financial sector.

Local zones allow clients to access processing centers closer to their datacenters and migrate their mainframes step by step.

“We also have oil and gas customers who want to use local zones to discover new products and do, for example, molecular dynamics simulations. For this, they have to have a very low response time,” he added.

In Argentina and Chile, the opportunities are similar.

The company also welcomes the advancement of 5G networks as a complement to its local cloud areas. Mattje de Carvalho mentioned applications for smart cities such as security cameras where low-latency video streaming and cloud analytics are needed. "Part of 5G is bringing computing power to the edge and local zones are also part of this strategy," he added.

By mid-December, AWS had some 25 local zones around the world, with announced plans to launch 27 more globally, including one in Santiago.

In Latin America, the company plans to launch local areas also in Colombia, Peru and Mexico, as well as a second one in Brazil. “We do not have an exact date, but we are going to continue launching the others over the next few months of 2023,” said Mattje de Carvalho.

In Argentina, the company first launched Edge content distribution infrastructure in 2019, in 2021 it presented Outpost, Amazon racks that are placed in customer datacenters and, now, the local zones.

The company invest according to demand in Argentina and Chile.

AWS cloud customers in Argentina include Mercado Libre, NaranjaX, Córdoba, Buenos Aires and Hospital Italiano.

In Chile, the company serves Universidad Andrés Bello and retailer Cencosud, among others.