Last week Amazon Web Services hosted its AWS Summit Johannesburg 2024 at the Sandton Convention Centre.

It is the second time that the annual event was held on the highveld, with this year’s iteration seemingly featuring more buzz and excitement given that lines to enter the venue stretched around the building. While the precise reason for the fervour is unknown, it may have something to do with the efforts that AWS South Africa is making when it comes to investment both locally and across the Sub-Saharan Africa region.

To that end, while addressing the audience during the opening keynote, AWS South Africa country general manager, Chris Erasmus, confirmed that the hyperscaler plans to invest R30.4 billion in SA by 2029.

To clarify, this is not just an investment for the region, but an investment specifically in AWS operations and infrastructure in South Africa alone, showcasing just how important the country in terms of the company’s global planning.

During one of the media roundtables at the event, Erasmus was asked precisely what the investment would entail.

“That is purely for AWS South Africa in terms of infrastructure investment to support our customers,” Erasmus noted.

“We have already spent R15.6 billion for investment, and that was once we announced the Cape Town region, that was part of the initial investment in order to put down the infrastructure that forms the three availability zones in South Africa. In line with that there are other investments around networking capability, our cloud-run edge locations, and the other infrastructure for customers,” he explained in terms of what AWS has done to date.

As for the R30.4 billion, Erasmus highlighted that it is designed to, “continuously expand with our customer, so as we continue to deploy more infrastructure, expand on current investments, we have the local zone that we have pre-announced for Johannesburg as well, that’s another infrastructure investment.”

“So it’s all those investments we believe we will make to support customer growth off the back of the adoption we have seen already, by 2029,” he continued.

Looking at how AWS South Africa currently operates locally, David Brown (pictured above), VP of Compute and Networking Services, noted that the company efforts when it comes to infrastructure are all in an effort to offer customers the easiest and most seamless cloud computing experience.

“We are always looking to invest in countries that have data centres,” the VP pointed out. “We have 33 regions globally. Every one of those regions is designed to the highest standard, it is something that AWS has not compromised on,” he stated emphatically.

“The regions we have in country are designed to serve our customers to the highest level of redundancy… We do have some customers that are concerned with latency for certain applications, and for that we have something called local zones, which is a way for use to very quickly deploy our infrastructure close to customers. We have used this broadly across the world, and we have a number of local zones in South Africa,” Brown outlined.

“The important thing is that it’s not really the number of data centres, but it is more that if a customer needs to launch an instance or if their business needs to scale, can AWS help? That is what we really focus on. We believe that in terms of capacity, operational stability, and security, there is nothing better than AWS,” he concluded.

With AWS South Africa aiming to have more customers leverage its services, particularly when it comes to generative AI via Amazon Bedrock, it is clear that the investments that the company is making locally, are all geared to ensure an increased level of readiness.