Amazon Web Services (AWS) has worked with these customers and partners, along with thousands of other New Zealand organisations, to support their digital transformation and migration to the cloud. We look forward to deepening our collaboration with them, using infrastructure based here in Aotearoa.
At AWS, it is our mission to support New Zealand’s digital transformation by providing local organisations with the most advanced, secure, and resilient cloud services to innovate and grow their businesses. To make sure we deliver on our commitment, we announced a $7.5 billion investment to build an AWS Region in Auckland, which is expected to create 1,000 new jobs and contribute $10.8 billion to New Zealand’s GDP over 15 years. Our new Region will enable Kiwi organisations of all sizes – from startups to enterprises, and from public sector to non-profits – to leverage cutting-edge technologies, meet data residency requirements, and serve the growing demand for cloud services in New Zealand.
Vector is a New Zealand energy company, which runs a portfolio of businesses delivering energy and communication services to more than 600,000 residential and commercial customers across New Zealand.
“We’re currently using AWS to run a significant portion of our digital workloads as we migrate, modernise, and transition toward a more sustainable environment. With local, faster access to AWS services through the Auckland Region, we can accelerate our vision of creating a new energy future. We're excited to be among the first companies in New Zealand to embrace the latest advancements in cloud technology,” said Jerry Li, General Manager, Digital Technology, Vector.
One NZ is one of New Zealand’s leading telecommunications companies, and has been leveraging AWS’s cloud capabilities and generative AI, including Amazon Bedrock, to drive new levels of customer experience and satisfaction within its contact centre. Within three months of going live, One NZ achieved a 10% increase in customers who report dealing with a knowledgeable and friendly representative, and a 10% increase in customer trust.
“We’re really excited about how One NZ will be able to leverage in-region workloads to support low latency and AI-driven customer experiences which make the most of AWS's generative AI, machine learning, and analytics capabilities to further enhance our customer experience,” said Jason Paris, CEO, One NZ.
Datacom, one of the region’s largest homegrown technology companies, is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner.
“Our strategic partnership with AWS has enabled our team to provide AWS cloud and advanced services, such as AI and ML, to help our customers accelerate their cloud transformation, boost productivity, and adopt new customer experiences,” said Justin Gray, Managing Director, Datacom New Zealand. “The strength of this almost 20-year partnership is that the solutions we develop for our customers are underpinned by AWS’s commitment to infrastructure, security, and privacy. We look forward to being among the first New Zealand organisations to leverage AWS’s new Auckland Region for our public and private sector customers.”
Empowering Kiwi businesses with the most secure and resilient infrastructure
One of the many reasons our customers and partners are so excited about our upcoming AWS Region is our world-class approach to security and resilience. AWS delivers the highest network availability of any cloud provider. We’ve instilled resilience into our infrastructure, service design and deployment, operational model, and mechanisms from day one.
One of the unique ways we build resiliency into our infrastructure is through the design of our Regions. AWS defines a Region as a physical location where we cluster multiple data centres. Each cluster of these data centres is called an Availability Zone (AZ), and an AWS Region has a minimum of three isolated, and physically separate AZs within a geographic area.
Where some other cloud providers may define a region as a single data centre, AWS’s design of having at least three AZs offers significant advantages for customers. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. This offers AWS customers high availability and greater fault tolerance.
This distinct Region design helps ensure applications are protected against disruptions, like human mistakes, unexpected traffic spikes, floods, utility failures, earthquakes, or even a global pandemic. Critical systems can be run out of several regions across the globe, achieving resiliency with even the most extreme-scale workloads.
Through the AWS Region in New Zealand, companies and organisations will be able to access the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services, including analytics, artificial intelligence, compute, database, Internet of Things, machine learning, mobile services, and storage.
A Sustainable Approach
AWS is constantly working on ways to increase the energy efficiency of its data centres—optimising data centre design, investing in purpose-built chips, and innovating with new cooling technologies. A report by Accenture, commissioned by AWS, estimates AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises, and when workloads are optimised on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99%. With the new AWS Region in New Zealand, customers will also benefit from AWS’s sustainability efforts across its infrastructure.
Our AWS Region in New Zealand will be powered with 100% renewable energy at launch, thanks to our collaboration with Mercury NZ on a long-term corporate power purchase agreement for the Turitea South wind farm. Globally, Amazon has already met its 100% renewable energy goal seven years ahead of schedule in 2023.
AWS also pledged to be “water positive” by 2030—returning more water to communities than our data centres use. AWS’s 2023 global water use efficiency (WUE) metric was 0.18 litres of water per kilowatt hour, the lowest amongst cloud providers that have released WUE numbers.
Continued investments to bring cloud even closer to customers in New Zealand
The launch of our AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region is one of several major investments we’ve announced to support the ongoing growth, innovation, and digital transformation of our Kiwi customers.
Last year, we launched an AWS Local Zone in Auckland, a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other services closer to customers – enabling them to build and deploy applications that require single-digit-millisecond latency closer to end users or on-premises data centres. This can help customers meet data residency requirements for regulatory and compliance-sensitive workloads right now
The AWS Local Zone complements other infrastructure in New Zealand. In 2020, we launched Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. It helps customers like TVNZ access our cloud services faster and provide improved user experiences for their customers. That same year, we launched AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer premises, used by local customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid cloud.
As cloud technologies continue to help organisations rapidly transform, employees with cloud skills are in high demand. To foster more talent, AWS signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the New Zealand government in 2023 to provide cloud training opportunities for 100,000 people in New Zealand. We have also been actively working with the Auckland community, including hosting women in technology sessions at our Auckland office, and collaborating with local STEM organisations.
Exciting Times Ahead
The launch of the AWS Region in New Zealand in 2025 will give New Zealand the secure tools, services and infrastructure necessary to build an AI-led digital economy to compete on the global stage.
We're excited about all the different possibilities this new Region will unlock for Aotearoa and look forward to continuing our partnership with Kiwi businesses, government agencies, and educational institutions to build a thriving digital future for New Zealand.
