$800M AWS Data Center Investment Planned For Argentina: Report

This past June, AWS announced it would invest in an Amazon CloudFront Edge location in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that would be operational this year, providing low latency and high data transfer rates for AWS customers to better deliver web content to their end users.

Amazon Web Services plans to invest approximately $800 million over a decade in a new South American data center in Argentina, according to a report out today.

AWS, the largest public cloud computing provider, chose to locate the data center in the Zona Franca Bahía Blanca Coronel Rosales area, in the southwest of the Buenos Aires province, so it can benefit from the free-trade zone’s tax breaks, Bloomberg reported today, citing unnamed people familiar with the plans who didn’t want to be identified.

AWS did not immediately respond to CRN’s requests for comment.

Argentina, which boasts Latin America’s second largest economy after Brazil and Mexico, is grappling with debt, including International Monetary Fund obligations, and concerns it will default, along with fears of potential political turmoil tied to its Oct. 27 presidential election. The Argentine National Congress last month passed the Knowledge Economy Law in June to promote knowledge-based and digital economy investments -- including software development and related activities such as cloud computing, in addition to biotechnology, nanotechnology, aerospace, artificial intelligence, robotics and internet of things -- that will be rewarded with tax incentives. Those incentives would include a reduction in Argentina’s income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent.

AWS opened an office in Buenos Aires, Argentina's capital city, in April 2018. This past June, it announced it would invest in an Amazon CloudFront Edge location in Buenos Aires that would be operational this year, providing low latency and high data transfer rates for AWS customers to better deliver web content to their end users. Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network designed to securely deliver data, videos, applications and application programming interfaces to customers with low latency and high transfer speeds in a developer-friendly environment.

Buenos Aires-based Mercado Libre, which operates e-commerce marketplaces for online sales and auctions and is referred to as the eBay and Amazon of Latin America, uses AWS to host and operate its platforms. Argentina’s largest company, it uses AWS products including Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift for big data and AWS Lambda.

Bloomberg reported early last year that both Argentina and Chile were vying to land a new AWS South American data center.

AWS’ existing South American cloud region is in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s financial center. Launched in 20l1, it has three EC2 availability zones. AWS also has South American edge network locations in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, also located in Brazil.

In all, AWS currently has 69 cloud availability zones in 22 geographic regions globally, and it's announced plans for an additional nine availability zones and three regions in Milan, South Africa’s Cape Town and Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital city.