Amazon.com Inc. in 2016 will open a new cluster of data centers in South Korea, as the Web retailer pushes deeper into Asia to compete with other cloud-computing providers such as Microsoft Corp. and Google.
The facilities are for the machines that power Amazon Web Services, the business that rents data storage and computing power to other companies, rather than its online retail operations. They are being built in response to requests from customers, including Samsung Electronics Co. and various gaming companies, Seattle-based Amazon announced Wednesday. The data centers will also let Amazon serve new clients, including government agencies and large enterprises that need to keep data exclusively in South Korea.
Some nations mandate that certain data, such as health records, can’t leave their country of origin, prohibiting cloud providers without data centers located in those countries from certain kinds of business. Proximity to customers also decreases response times for those running Internet-based cloud applications.
Amazon didn’t disclose the size of its investment.