Amazon Web Services has opened its first cloud region in Chile, backed by more than 4 billion dollars of investment, in a move that gives Chilean businesses a local home for their data and workloads for the first time.

AWS announced on Tuesday 11 November that the South America (Chile) Region is now operational for a select group of customers, with general availability expected in the coming weeks, before the end of 2026. It is the company's first region in Chile and its third in Latin America, after Sao Paulo in Brazil and Mexico Central.

Until now, Chilean workloads have largely run from Sao Paulo or other regions abroad. Hosting them locally means lower latency for users in Chile, and it lets organisations with data-residency requirements keep their content stored inside the country.

Three sites around Santiago

The new region consists of three physically independent availability zones, in Huechuraba, Padre Hurtado and Lampa, each with its own power, cooling and connectivity. Early customers include BancoEstado de Chile, the BTG banking group, retailer Cencosud, insurer Consorcio, Itaú and retailer Ripley.

The region starts with core compute, storage, networking and database services. Artificial intelligence services, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, will be added during its first year, AWS said, so the full AI toolkit will not be available locally from day one.

Amazon plans to invest more than 4 billion dollars in Chile to build, connect, operate and maintain the data centres. The company estimates the project will contribute more than 7.5 billion dollars to Chile's GDP and support an average of 4,100 full-time equivalent jobs a year across construction, maintenance, engineering, telecommunications and data-centre operations.

Sustainability and skills

The Chile sites will be largely air-cooled, with AWS estimating that water will be used in the cooling systems for only about 4 percent of the year. The region is architected to be sovereign-by-design, AWS said, a reference to controls that let customers keep their data and operations within national boundaries.

With the launch, AWS's global network spans 39 infrastructure regions. The company is also investing in local skills: in September it launched AWS Entrena Chile with two Chilean ministries, a training programme aiming to reach 300,000 learners by 2028.

Paula Bellizia, vice-president of AWS for Latin America, said the region would help Chilean organisations of all sizes, from startups to banks and government bodies, run applications closer to their customers. For Chile, the opening marks a step up in the region's cloud map: the country has long been a hub for data-centre investment thanks to its stable power grid and cool climate, and it now hosts a full region from the world's largest cloud provider.

The launch comes as cloud providers race to build capacity across Latin America, driven by demand for AI workloads and by governments and regulators pressing for data to be stored locally. For Chilean businesses, the practical change is simple: from the end of this year, they will be able to run their applications on AWS infrastructure located in Chile itself, rather than hundreds of miles away.