Amazon announced Thursday the launch of its second European Amazon Web Services data center in Frankfurt, Germany. The existing data center is in Ireland.
Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, is opening a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in Germany as compliance to the European Union and German privacy law. The new data center, referred to as "Region," is located in Frankfurt, Germany, and second in Europe. Amazon's first AWS Region is situated in Dublin, Ireland, where all major U.S. tech companies run their data centers and headquarters.
"It is time to expand the AWS footprint once again, this time with a new Region in Frankfurt, Germany," Amazon reported in a blog post Thursday. "AWS customers in Europe can now use the new EU (Frankfurt) Region along with the existing EU (Ireland) Region for fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS infrastructure services. You can now build multi-Region applications with the assurance that your content will stay within the EU."
The decision to open a new data center in Frankfurt comes as a legal requirement by EU and Germany's data privacy laws, which asks some data to be stored locally. The addition of a new data center brings the total number of data centers across the world to 11 and helps serve several hundred thousand customers in more than 190 countries. The Frankfurt data center will join the Ireland Region in the EU to offer new business opportunities in Europe and the Middle East.
The new move comes at a crucial time after the Snowden revelations of U.S. spying activities on customers' data. As a result, many countries have called for local storage of data to better protect users' privacy. Europe has one of the toughest data protection policies and German strict laws add more protection.
"By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we're enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth," Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services, said in a statement, according to Business Wire.
