AWS opens a Chile region and plans more than $4 billion

AWS has opened its first cloud region in Chile to a select group of customers. General availability is expected by the end of 2026. Amazon plans to invest more than $4 billion to support the region.

It is AWS's third region in Latin America. The company already operates regions in Sao Paulo and in central Mexico. AWS says the Chile region joins a network of 39 infrastructure regions.

The spending figure is a plan, not a completed outlay. Amazon says the investment is estimated to add more than $7.5 billion to Chile's GDP and to support an average of 4,100 full-time equivalent jobs a year. Those jobs include telecommunications, construction, electricity generation, and data center operations. The GDP and jobs figures are estimates.

The region will open with core services. AWS says compute, storage, networking, and database services will be available at launch. Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI are expected within the first year. AWS says it has trained more than 200,000 people in Chile on cloud skills since 2017 and is targeting 300,000 learners by 2028.

AWS says the Chile data centers will be primarily air-cooled. It says they will not need ongoing cooling water in operations. It also says that when they are fully operational they will be seven times more efficient than the industry average.

One Chilean customer is already on AWS. AWS says LATAM Airlines is using Amazon Bedrock for a virtual assistant that resolves more than 32 percent of call-center interactions without a transfer to an agent.