Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced an expansion into Spain with a new cloud infrastructure region that’s set to open in late 2022 or early 2023.

The region will be the company’s seventh in Europe, alongside existing facilities in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm and another upcoming region in Milan.

Amazon said the Spain region will launch with three availability zones, or physical regions that have their own independent power, cooling and security in place.

The company currently operates 22 regions with 69 availability zones worldwide, and its expansion plans call for four more regions (in Indonesia, Italy, South Korea and Spain) with a total of 13 new availability zones.

AWS already offers an AWS Edge location in the Spanish capital Madrid, where data is cached to reduce latency for users in the country that wish to access another AWS region. It’s opening the Spanish region because its services are becoming quite popular in Spain. In its announcement, it noted that two-thirds of companies listed on the Spanish stock market are already customers.

AWS has also achieved “Esquema Nacional de Seguridad” certification, which means its cloud infrastructure services meet the Spanish government’s security and compliance standards, so AWS can offer its services to all Spanish government agencies and public organizations. Amazon’s announcement caught the attention of no less than the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez himself, who said the new region would be an important development for the country.

“This investment from AWS will allow Spain to fully adapt to the digital transformation and develop as an international center of innovation and technology,” Sanchez said. “Cloud computing, in addition to promoting technological progress in the private sector, will enable the Public Administration to improve the services it provides to citizens. A secure cloud is an essential tool for the development of our economy, as well as for the generation of jobs in our country.”

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