Amazon Web Services opening hub in Calgary, creating over 950 local jobs
Amazon Web Services has announced plans to open its second Canadian infrastructure Region in Calgary, bringing a $4 billion investment and more than 950 jobs to the area.
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS continually expands its services to support virtually any cloud workload. It now has more than 200 fully featured services for computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, artificial intelligence, mobile, security, virtual and augmented reality, application development, and more.
The tech giant announced the new Amazon Web Services infrastructure on Monday. The Calgary Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) at launch, joining three existing AZs at Montreal’s current AWS Canada Central Region.
Availability Zones place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations, situated far enough to support customers’ business continuity but close enough to provide low latency for high availability applications using multiple zones. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
The AWS Canada West Calgary Region hub is slated to open in late 2023 or early 2024. It aims to provide customers with even lower latency, greater fault tolerance, and resiliency for critical cloud workloads.
Canadian organizations such as Air Canada, Athabasca University, Benevity, BMO Financial Group, Canada Border Services Agency, D2L, Hootsuite, Neo Financial, NHL, Nutrien, Lululemon Athletica, and Sun Life use AWS to run their workloads, drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time to market.
The upcoming AWS Calgary Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises, plus government, education, and nonprofit organizations, to run their applications and serve end-users from Amazon data centres in Canada.
“Our infrastructure in Canada has allowed customers to transform the way businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies serve their stakeholders,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS, in a press release.
AWS has 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch 27 more Availability Zones and nine more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.
By 2037, AWS plans to invest $21 billion in Calgary and the existing Region in Montreal. The investment will add $39 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) and support more than 5,000 full-time jobs in the country’s economy.
Of that $21 billion investment, more than $4 billion will be for the new AWS Region in Calgary. That investment will add almost $5 billion to Canada’s GDP and create more than 950 jobs by 2037.
“This major investment from AWS again demonstrates that Alberta is establishing itself as a dominant player in digital technology and innovation,” said Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in the press release.
“This multibillion-dollar data centre project in our province underscores the work being done by Invest Alberta to create jobs and diversify the economy,” added Kenney.
Courtesy of Amazon
AWS has already invested more than a billion dollars in Canada in both capital and operating expenditures, which has added a billion dollars to the country’s GDP and supported more than 600 jobs between 2016 and 2021.
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