Amazon Web Services Inc. today disclosed plans to build a cloud region, or data center cluster, in Switzerland to support the numerous local companies and public sector organizations that use its platform.

The announcement adds more momentum to the Amazon.com Inc. unit’s infrastructure expansion efforts in Europe, which have accelerated over recent years. The Swiss cloud region is scheduled to open sometime in the second half of 2022. 

An AWS cloud region is a group of data centers, usually three, that are located close enough to enable rapid transfer of data but far enough to prevent a localized outage from taking them all offline. Companies can their workloads across multiple data centers in a region to reduce the risk of downtime.

AWS already has a substantial presence in Switzerland. The Amazon.com unit has opened two local offices over the past four years, one in Zurich and one in Geneva, and lists dozens of job openings on its Swiss career page.

Novartis International AG, Swiss Re Co. Ltd. and Roche Holding AG are among the thousands of Swiss companies that already use AWS. Notably, the cloud giant also has a long list of public sector customers in the country, including the national postal service. The planned cloud region should open new deal opportunities for AWS, in both the public sector and enterprise, by allowing it to compete for sensitive workloads that must be hosted in Switzerland-based data data centers to comply with local data sovereignty regulations.

There are also other go-to-market benefits to the planned expansion. The new cloud region will enable AWS to support large multinational customers more effectively by giving their Switzerland-based employees and facilities lower-latency access to cloud resources. The lower latency will also be a plus for AWS when going after certain specific types of cloud deals, such as real-time analytics projects where network speeds are a priority.

AWS, which regularly adds new data centers to its cloud, has stepped up the pace of its European expansion since 2017. Three of the six cloud regions it operates in the region have launched in the last three years and it’s currently building two more: the planned Swiss cloud region announced today, plus another being constructed in Spain.

The cloud giant has been making networking investments in parallel to help link its European data centers with the rest of its cloud. AWS last year signed a deal to use one of the eight fiber pairs inside Marea, the world’s highest-capacity subsea internet cable, which stretches 4,000 miles from Spain to the U.S. Cloud rival Microsoft Corp. is another user of the cable. 

Photo: AWS