AWS’ next data center site will be in Paris

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the subsidiary of Amazon that is the biggest provider of public cloud computing and storage infrastructure for running applications, today announced that it will be opening a new region of data centers in France, specifically in the Paris metropolitan area.

“This will be the fourth AWS Region in Europe,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. “We currently have two other Regions in Europe — EU (Ireland) and EU (Frankfurt) and an additional Region in the UK expected to launch in the coming months.”

Bringing regions to more places means that organizations can meet local regulations about where their data is stored. And when sites are closer, it takes less time for data to travel and for applications to load. AWS has been expanding its data center infrastructure continuously since it launched in 2006.

Earlier this year, AWS announced that its Mumbai and Seoul regions were ready for use, and AWS also said a Canada region would be coming.

AWS strives to stand out from its competitors — like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM SoftLayer — by regularly introducing and updating features and by cutting prices.

But building out new data center infrastructure takes a considerable amount of money. In the second quarter of this year, Amazon’s AWS business had $2.02 billion in operating expenses.