Amazon’s next AWS data center region will be in Canada

Public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that it will open a new region of data centers in Canada — specifically Montreal — sometime in the next 12 months.

“The planned Canada-Montreal region will give AWS partners and customers the ability to run their workloads and store their data in Canada,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post today.

Expansion into Canada should be welcome news to AWS customers in Canada, who have not had their own region in the nearly 10 years of the service’s existence. Applications could perform better and data could be delivered to end users more quickly as a result of a closer region.

Amazon has expanded the geographic reach of AWS many times over the years. Recently it has committed to opening regions in India, Korea, Ohio, and the United Kingdom.

Other cloud providers, like the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, have expanded their own fleets of data centers in their quest to compete with Amazon, which is the leader of the market. The clouds also compete on prices and features.

AWS has more than 1 million customers, and it generated more than $2 billion in revenue for Amazon in the third quarter of 2015.