Kiwibank, MATTR, and Deloitte have signed up to use the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region when it launches this year. These customers join Vector, One NZ, and Datacom who all previously announced their commitment to use the Region.
AWS supports millions of customers globally, and thousands of customers and partners across New Zealand with their digital transformation, including integrating the latest artificial intelligence (AI) solutions such as agentic AI into their business to drive innovation, new customer experiences, and productivity gains. We are excited to deepen these engagements and accelerate cloud and AI adoption using world-class infrastructure located right here in Aotearoa.
Our planned $7.5 billion investment to build an AWS Region in Auckland is expected to contribute $10.8 billion to New Zealand’s GDP over a 15 year period, and will enable Kiwi organisations of all sizes – from startups to enterprises, and from public sector to non-profits – to innovate and scale faster using the most secure and resilient infrastructure, all while meeting data residency preferences in New Zealand.
Continued investments to bring cloud computing even closer to customers in New Zealand
To unlock the full potential of cloud computing technology and AI, AWS has committed to upskilling New Zealanders as part of its Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the New Zealand government to provide cloud training for 100,000 people in New Zealand by 2027. Today, I’m excited to announce that we have trained more than 50,000 Kiwi already. These investments help to address the strong demand for digital skills talent in New Zealand, with 63% of New Zealand employers saying that hiring AI-skilled talent is a priority but nearly 70% saying they cannot find the AI talent they need, according to a 2024 report by Access Partnership. That’s why we continue to invest in cloud training opportunities through a range of programs including AWS Academy, AWS Skills Builder, AWS Educate, and AWS re/Start.
Kiwibank is the largest New Zealand-owned bank, supporting over one million customers.
“A local AWS region will be a game-changer, boosting performance, resilience, and security while keeping data closer to our customers. Kiwibank's partnership work with AWS on CloudUp for Her has already shown how cloud adoption drives both innovation and talent development. With this expansion, we will be able to scale faster, create more opportunities to upskill talent, and maintain the reliability and security our customers expect,” said Ranjit Jayanandhan, General Manager, Experience Hub at Kiwibank.
MATTR is a New Zealand-based organisation providing infrastructure and digital trust services to businesses and governments.
"MATTR is thrilled to be part of the launch of the AWS New Zealand Region. This milestone is significant, allowing us to deliver more options to New Zealand customers for their TrustTech solutions, helping to ensure that New Zealand’s unique needs around data sovereignty can be met. Having a local AWS Region means we can better support public and private sector organisations in building secure, privacy-preserving digital experiences — all while keeping sensitive data onshore. This provides choice for New Zealand customers using Mattr's verifiable credential and digital identity solutions backed by world-class infrastructure from AWS available locally as the foundation for growth and scale," said Martin Eichenberg, Head of Site Reliability & Operations at MATTR.
Deloitte New Zealand is a professional services organisation providing audit, tax, technology and systems, strategy and performance improvement, risk management, corporate finance, business recovery, forensic and accounting services.
“We view the launch of the Auckland Region as an important step forward in New Zealand’s technology sector that will enable our customers to generate even more business value from cloud solutions. As a leading AWS Partner, training and certification are key to the development of our people, and we see the Region as driving further education around cloud as the demand for AWS skills increases. This will ignite New Zealand’s transition to a technology hub and continue to enhance our reputation for innovation,” said Damian Harvey, Technology Partner at Deloitte.
Providing Kiwi businesses with the most secure and resilient infrastructure – with the highest availability
Customers and partners globally know that AWS infrastructure offers world-class security and resilience. In New Zealand, it will offer the highest network availability of any cloud provider according to a recent study by Frost and Sullivan, which found that AWS had an industry leading availability of 99.54%, higher than any other hyperscale 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, or earthquakes. Critical systems can be run out of several AWS Regions across the globe, achieving resiliency with even the most extreme-scale workloads.
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 recent report from Accenture 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% by leveraging AWS’s purpose-built silicon. 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, and has been the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five straight years.
The launch of our AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region is just one of several major investments we’ve announced to support the ongoing growth, innovation, and digital transformation of our Kiwi customers, and we look forward to strengthening our partnership to build a better, more connected future for Aotearoa.
