Cloud

Amazon Web Services has plans to open an infrastructure Region in Alberta, Canada, in late 2023/early 2024. The new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) at launch and join the existing AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal, which also consists of three Availability Zones.

Globally, 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. The upcoming AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations, to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in Canada. AWS also released an economic impact study (EIS) estimating that the company’s spending on construction and the operation of the new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region and existing AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal will together create more than 5,000 new jobs with an estimated investment of over $17 billion (CA$21 billion) in the local economies by 2037. Both infrastructure Regions will add an estimated $31.6 billion (CA$39 billion) to Canada’s GDP over the same time period.

“Our infrastructure in Canada has allowed customers to transform the way businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies serve their stakeholders. With another AWS Region in Canada, customers will see even lower latency for emerging solutions like 5G-enabled applications and machine learning at the edge, and it will strengthen their ability to architect their regional infrastructure for even greater fault tolerance, resiliency, and availability,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, Vice President of Infrastructure Services at AWS. “We are excited to build world-class infrastructure to help organizations reinvent how they deliver customer solutions and fuel economic growth.”

“This major investment from AWS again demonstrates that Alberta is establishing itself as a dominant player in digital technology and innovation. This multibillion-dollar data center project in our province underscores the work being done by Invest Alberta to create jobs and diversify the economy,” said Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. “I look forward to working with AWS on this project and seeing how it will strengthen Alberta’s information technology and communication sector.”

AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Availability Zones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region will enable customers with data residency preferences to securely store data in Canada while providing even lower latency across the country and more flexibility to run applications across multiple Regions.

Overall, AWS is estimated to invest over $17 billion (CA$21 billion) in Canada by 2037 through the construction and operation of its two infrastructure Regions.

This AWS infrastructure investment is expected to increase Canada’s GDP by approximately more than $31 billion (CA$39 billion) over the same time period. In the newly announced AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region, AWS plans to invest over $3 billion (CA$4 billion) by 2037, which includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centers, operational expenses such as ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses. The EIS also estimates that the new AWS Region will bring direct and indirect economic benefits like new employment and sales for the data center supply chain and related sectors in Canada. In total, investment in the new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region is estimated to create more than 950 new full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in Canada.

Investing in Canada’s Future

In addition to the AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal, AWS has launched five Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds.

Amazon opened tech hubs in Toronto and Vancouver for developers, engineers, sales, marketing, and business development professionals to help local customers and partners, and opened the AWS Thinkbox office in Winnipeg focused on the development of solutions and services for the creative industry. In March 2021, Amazon Games launched a new development studio in Montreal, and Amazon currently has 17 fulfillment centers, six sortation centers, and 35 delivery stations across the country.

Amazon employs more than 39,500 full-time and part-time employees, and the company has announced plans to create thousands of additional jobs in the country across its operations network and teams including AWS, Amazon Ads, Amazon Games, Alexa, and Prime Video.