Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the opening of its second infrastructure region in Canada, AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region. It offers three Availability Zones (AZs): large data centres which are, AWS said, “located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple AZs.”

Each has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS said that customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple AZs to achieve even greater fault tolerance.

Réjean Bourgault, country leader and managing director of public sector at AWS Canada, said that, in addition, customers using the AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal, which opened in 2016, will now be able to use the Calgary facilities for disaster recovery while maintaining Canadian data residency.

“And also,” he noted, “the other advantage of this is that western customers that require very low latency for their different workloads will be able to use the Canada West region.”

Bourgault said that the company’s four renewable energy projects in Alberta, including wind farms and solar farms, will, once in operation, generate enough energy to power the equivalent of 1.7 million Canadian homes, and contribute to Amazon’s goal of powering its overall infrastructure with renewable energy by 2025.

AWS plans to invest US$17.9 billion (about C$24.8 billion) in Canada through 2037, the company said, noting that the new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region is estimated to support an average of more than 1,300 FTE (full-time equivalent) jobs annually, and that it plans to invest more than US$2.9 billion (approx. C$4 billion) in Alberta through 2037.

These jobs, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and others, will be part of the AWS supply chain in Canada.

In addition, it said, the construction and operation of the two Canadian AWS infrastructure Regions is estimated to generate more than US$31 billion (approx. C$43.02 billion) in gross domestic product (GDP), and the new AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region is estimated to add about US$4.1 billion (C$5.62 billion) to Canada’s GDP through 2037.

François-Philippe Champagne, federal minister of innovation, science and industry, said in a release, “Our government is committed to positioning our domestic industries for long-term growth and sustainability.”

The digital infrastructure being established by AWS near Calgary, he added, will support Canadian developers, startups, large enterprises and academic institutions in their work by enabling access to AWS’s powerful advanced cloud technologies.

“This means faster and more reliable access to cloud services to support computing, storage, networking, analytics, artificial intelligence, mobile, hybrid, media, and security, which helps to secure well-paying jobs across many new industries.”