AWS opens its first cloud region in Chile for early customers

The new site is called the AWS South America (Chile) Region. It is open to a limited group of customers now. AWS says general availability is expected in the coming weeks, and by the end of 2026 at the latest.

It is the company's first region in Chile and its third in Latin America. The other two are São Paulo and Mexico (Central). With this one, AWS runs 39 infrastructure regions worldwide.

Amazon plans to invest more than $4 billion in Chile to support it. The company first announced the plan on May 12, 2025, when it said the region would open in late 2026. That promise has now been kept, at least for the early customers.

The plan, as announced then, places the data centers in the Santiago province. At the time, Prasad Kalyanaraman, AWS vice president of infrastructure services, said the region would help serve the fast-growing demand for cloud services across Latin America and in Chile.

A region is a place on the map where AWS clusters its data centers. Think of it as a neighborhood of server buildings that act as one.

Each group of data centers is called an Availability Zone. Every region has at least three of them. Each zone has its own power, cooling and physical security. Fast fiber cables connect them.

Why three? If a storm or a power cut hits one zone, the other two keep your app running. It is like keeping three spare keys in three different houses.

In real life Think of a region like a bank with three branches in one city. If one branch closes for the day, your money is still reachable at the other two.

AWS lists six early customers: BancoEstado de Chile, BTG, Cencosud, Consorcio, Itaú and Ripley. Banks, insurers and retailers, in other words, the kind of companies that care a lot about where their data sits.

Joaquín Saul, chief information officer of BTG Pactual, said the new region opens opportunities "to keep evolving and improving our processing capacity and resilience, as well as to explore new applications of artificial intelligence."

Javier Henríquez of Consorcio Seguros said the cloud gives the insurer "critical availability and permanent backup." He added that it also helps deliver better service using analytics and AI.

Companies in Chile already ran their systems on AWS. They just did it from regions in other countries, far away. Now they can run workloads and store content at home.

Two things make that useful. The first is latency, which means the delay between you tapping a button and the server answering. A server closer to you answers faster. AWS says users across the Southern Cone and neighboring markets, including Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru, should see lower latency. It puts that area at 123 million people and about $1.5 trillion in GDP.

The second is data residency, a rule that some data must stay inside a country. Chile's financial market regulator has set requirements for banks that process critical workloads in the cloud. A new data protection law adds more residency duties. A local region gives companies a simple way to meet them.

Paula Bellizia, AWS vice president for Latin America, put it this way: customers "needed to keep their data in the country, meet regulatory requirements more easily, and give their own customers faster, more reliable experiences."

At launch, the region offers core compute, storage, networking and database services. That is the basic toolbox: rented computers, places to keep files and databases.

AI comes later. AWS says Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI will be available within the first year of launch. Bedrock is AWS's service for using AI models without running them yourself. SageMaker AI is where teams build and train their own models.

This matters because Chile is leaning into AI. AWS cites the AI Readiness Index, where Chile ranks first in Latin America, and says 78% of Chilean companies are already integrating AI. The country also has a $2.5 billion data center investment pipeline and 338 active fintech firms, which are companies that offer financial services through software.

Amazon estimates the region will add more than $7.5 billion to Chile's GDP. It also expects it to support an average of 4,100 full-time jobs a year. Those jobs are in telecommunications, construction, electricity generation and data center operations, not only in the data centers themselves.

These are Amazon's own estimates, so treat them as projections, not measurements. Still, building a data center region touches many trades, from the people pouring concrete to the power companies feeding the building.

AWS also points to training. It says it has trained more than 200,000 people in Chile on cloud skills since 2017 and targets 300,000 learners by 2028. A program called AWS Entrena Chile launched in September 2026, backed by Chile's Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Economy. It offers free AI and cloud training. AWS Academy reaches more than 111,000 students at 50 higher education institutions in the country.

Data centers get hot, and cooling them can drink a lot of water. AWS says this region will be mainly air-cooled and will not need cooling water in ongoing operations. It adds that the data centers will be seven times more efficient than the industry average when fully operational. That is AWS's own claim.

Amazon also says it wants to be water positive by 2030, meaning it aims to return more water than it uses. As part of that, AWS launched a water project in Chile in August 2024. It works with local farmers and the climate technology company Kilimo to move about 67 hectares of farmland in the Maipo basin from flood irrigation to drip irrigation. AWS says that saves roughly 200 million liters of water a year.

The company also keeps its goal of net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.

• If you live in Chile: apps from banks, insurers and stores may get faster, and your data can stay in the country.
• If you run a company in the region: you can build on AWS without sending your customers' data abroad. Check which services are live before you plan, because AI tools come within the first year.
• If you follow AI: the Bedrock and SageMaker promise shows where AI work in Latin America is headed. Expect more local AI products once they arrive.
• If you are a student: AWS says university students worldwide can earn credits, premium training and certification vouchers through a Student Rewards program on AWS Builder Center.