Last year we launched new AWS Regions in France and China (Ningxia), and announced that we are working on regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the United States.

South Africa in Early 2020

Today, I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa. The addition of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will also enable organizations to provide lower latency to end users across Sub-Saharan Africa and will enable more African organizations to leverage advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation.

AWS customers are already making use of 55 Availability Zones across 19 infrastructure regions worldwide. Today’s announcement brings the total number of global regions (operational and in the works) up to 23.

A Growing Presence

The new Region is the latest of a series of investments in South Africa, and is part our commitment to support South Africa’s transformation. In 2004, Amazon opened a Development Center in Cape Town that focuses on building pioneering networking technologies, next generation software for customer support, and the technology behind Amazon EC2. AWS has also added a number of teams including account managers, customer services reps, partner managers, solutions architects, and more, helping customers of all sizes as they move to the cloud.

In 2015, we continued our expansion, opening an office in Johannesburg, and in 2017 we brought the Amazon Global Network to Africa through AWS Direct Connect. Earlier this year we launched infrastructure on the African continent introducing Amazon CloudFront to South Africa, with two new edge locations in Cape Town and Johannesburg. We also support the growth of technology education with AWS Academy and AWS Educate and have supported the growth of new businesses through AWS Activate in the country for many years.

The addition of the AWS Region in South Africa will help builders and entrepreneurs in enterprises, the public sector, and startups across Sub-Saharan Africa to innovate and grow their organizations.

Talk to Us

As always, we are looking forward to serving new and existing customers in South Africa and working with partners across the region. Of course, the new Region will also be open to existing AWS customers who would like to serve users in South Africa and across the African continent.

To learn more about the AWS South Africa Region feel free to contact our team at aws-in-africa@amazon.com. If you are interested in joining the team and would like to learn more about AWS positions in South Africa, take a look at the Amazon Jobs site.

— Jeff;