Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened its new AWS South America (Chile) Region to select customers on Wednesday, with plans to make it generally available to everyone else by the end of this year.
The Chile Region – which consists of three Availability Zones – is initially offering core compute, storage, networking, and database services. AWS said that foundational AI and machine learning services, including Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI, will be available within the first year of launch.
Early customers include BancoEstado de Chile, BTG, Cencosud, Consorcio, Itaú, and Ripley.
The South America (Chile) Region has been in the works since May 2025, when Amazon announced it would invest US$4 billion to build cloud infrastructure in Chile by the end of 2026.
AWS said the new Region enables organizations in Chile that have previously been running their technology infrastructure on other AWS Regions to now do so locally.
This not only promises lower latency for end users in neighboring markets like Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Peru, but also easier compliance with financial regulations regarding critical workloads using cloud services, as well as data residency obligations under Chile’s new data protection law.
“At AWS, everything we build starts with listening to our customers, and what they told us was clear: they needed to keep their data in the country, meet regulatory requirements more easily, and give their own customers faster, more reliable experiences,” said Paula Bellizia, vice president of AWS for Latin America.
AWS also said the Chile Region will be primarily air-cooled and won’t require the ongoing use of cooling water in operations.
While the impact of data centres on water supplies has received growing attention in more countries the past year, it’s been an issue in Chile for even longer. The country is enduring an ongoing drought that started in 2010. The government began enforcing water rationing in 2022, and in February 2024 partially reversed a data centre permit granted to Google four years earlier because of its water-cooled design.
AWS pointed out that it launched a water efficiency project in Chile in August 2024 with climate technology company Kilimo to transition around 67 hectares of agricultural land from flood irrigation to drip irrigation in the Maipo basin. AWS said the project is saving about 200 million litres of water per year. AWS aims to be “water positive” (that is, to return more water than it uses) by 2030.
The South America (Chile) Region is AWS’ third Region in Latin America, alongside its South America (São Paulo) and Mexico (Central) Regions. AWS now has 39 infrastructure Regions worldwide.
