Indonesia's industry minister has come out in support of Amazon's plans to establish three availability zones in Jakarta by the end of next year or early 2022.

Back in April, AWS announced it was working on its Asia Pacific Region in Indonesia. According to its blog, the data centers will be located near the country's capital city. These "zones" allow AWS customers and partners to run workloads and store their data in Indonesia.

As of yet, no details have been given by AWS pertaining to any planned build or establishment of a data center.

City in the cloud

The latest news comes by way of the Industry Minister Agus Gumiwang while at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. He said: “This investment can boost Indonesia to become a strategic digital hub. The AWS region in Indonesia will certainly support the start-up ecosystem so it can grow rapidly.

“It can also help create more jobs and companies in the technology sector.”

Gumiwang said this after a meeting with AWS's global public policy VP Michael Punke, according to The Jakarta Post.

Jakarta will be joining other AWS regions in the Asia-Pacific such as Hong Kong, Beijing and Ningxia in China, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney.

Data laws

In November, representatives of Indonesia's digital infrastructure operators protested a proposed reform to the country’s Electronic Systems and Transactions law, also known as Government Regulation 82 of 2012 (PP 82/2012).

Rather than treating all data the same way, the proposal divides it into different categories, and non-critical data would be allowed to be stored outside of Indonesia. However, the Indonesian operators said in a joint press release that a hasty relaxation of data localization policy could harm national industrial growth and erode data protection frameworks.