Amazon Web Services Inc. said today that it will launch a data center cluster, or region as the provider calls it, in the Japanese city of Osaka to address local demand for cloud services.

Construction is expected to complete early next year. The Osaka data center cluster will be AWS’ ninth in the Asia Pacific region when it goes online. 

AWS already operates a small cloud facility in Osaka that mainly serves as a disaster recovery and backup site for customers that use its main Tokyo data center cluster. The Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary plans to upgrade the hub into full-blown region complete with three separate, interlinked cloud facilities that will be located a short distance apart to prevent localized outages from cascading across locations.

“When launched, the Osaka Region will provide the same broad range of services as other AWS Regions and will be available to all AWS customers,” Harunobu Kameda, a product marketing evangelist with AWS Japan, wrote in a blog post. “Customers will be capable of deploying multi-region systems within Japan, and those users located in western Japan will enjoy even lower latency than what they have today.”

The Osaka site will be located about 250 miles from the Greater Tokyo metropolitan area and should enable AWS to pursue more enterprise deals in Osaka Prefecture, a major commercial center with a population of more than 8 million people. Cloud spending is growing in Japan across the board as local organizations modernize their information technology infrastructure. It’s estimated that the Japanese cloud market will grow more than 20% annually through 2023 to reach $15.3 billion.

AWS has established a fairly solid presence locally, to the point that even companies in highly regulated sectors like finance are moving workloads to its data centers. One such customer is Sony Corp.’s online banking business, Sony Bank. The news of the Osaka expansion was paired with the announcement that Sony Bank will shift its entire infrastructure to AWS. 

While AWS works to carve out a bigger slice of the region’s growing cloud market, parent Amazon is going after e-commerce opportunities. The Japanese version of Amazon’s marketplace processed $13.8 billion worth of sales last year and the company has invested billions of dollars in India to court online shoppers in the world’s second most populous nation.

Photo: AWS