AWS' Global Data Center Expansion Continues Into Italy

Amazon Web Services is continuing its aggressive data center expansion overseas as the public cloud titan said Tuesday that it will open three new data centers in Italy.

"We've been amazed with how Italian companies have invented on top of AWS thus far, but believe an AWS Region in Italy makes it even easier for Italian companies and government organizations to reinvent and evolve customer and citizen experiences for many decades to come," said AWS CEO Andy Jassy in a statement.

The Seattle-based public cloud leader has been expanding its data center footprint in Europe over the past several years, with a total of 12 facilities it dubs “Availability Zones” already established throughout France, Germany, Ireland and the U.K. AWS is also launching a new data center region in Stockholm, Sweden, that are expected to open later this year.

[Related: AWS CEO Jassy Taunts Oracle's Ellison After Amazon Turns Off Oracle Data Warehouse]

In addition to the Milan, Italy, facilities, AWS is preparing to open data centers in Bahrain, Hong Kong Special Administration Region, and Cape Town, which will mark AWS' first facility in Africa. All of the data centers are expected to be opened by the first half of 2020.

Amazon plans to open the three new data centers in Milan, Italy, in early 2020, aimed at enabling organizations to provider lower latency to end users in the country. AWS said local customers with data residency requirements will be able to store their content in the country with the assurance that they retain complete control over the location of their data.

The news comes just one day after Facebook and its Workplace collaboration tool suffered an outage that racked up thousands of complaints.

AWS said it continues to build teams of account managers, solutions architects, business developers, partner managers, professional services consultants, technology evangelists and startup community developers in offices in Milan and Rome to help customers of all sizes move to AWS.

In 2012, AWS launched an infrastructure Point of Presence (PoP) in Milan that delivers Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF services to the country. In 2017, AWS opened a second PoP location in Palermo. AWS systems integrators that work in Italy include Accenture, Capgemini and DXC Technology.

AWS currently provides 57 Availability Zones across 19 geographic regions globally. AWS data centers are most densely populated in northern Virginia with a total of six data centers in the region.