Amazon Web Services has announces plans for a new data center region in the United Arab Emirates.
The new region will consist of three Availability Zones and is set to open in the first half of 2022.
This will be the company’s second region in the Middle East, having launched a Bahrain region in 2019.
“We are excited to build on the great momentum of cloud adoption in the Middle East by providing more choice for customers in the UAE to run applications and store data locally,” said Peter DeSantis, SVP of Global Infrastructure at AWS. “With the new region, organizations of all sizes will be able to innovate faster and serve end-users with even lower latency across the region.”
The company currently has UAE Edge locations in Dubai and Fujairah, but hasn’t detailed where the three data centers for the new region will be located.
“We have been using AWS Outposts for both development and test and production workloads,” said Yuri Misnik, Chief Technology Officer, FAB. “We welcome the upcoming AWS Region in the UAE, which will help us realize our cloud ambitions effectively and securely while being fully compliant with local regulation.”
Despite Dubai’s importance in the region, many cloud players have eschewed the country for its Middle Eastern neighbours. Microsoft and Oracle have opened a cloud region in the UAE, but Israel, Bahrain, and Qatar all have multiple companies either already in market or developing facilities.
