Amazon Expands its Cloud to South America

Amazon Web Services has expanded its cloud computing platform to South America with the addition of data center infrastructure in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The new data center capacity allows Amazon users to house and serve data from Sao Paulo. The new region will offer the full range AWS services, including its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), as well as Amazon's Route 53 DNS service and CloudFront content delivery service..

"With the opening of this new Region, AWS customers in South and Central America can now enjoy fast, low-latency access to the suite of AWS infrastructure services," wrote Amazon Web Services' Jeff Barr in announcing the new region. As part of the expansion, portions of the AWS web site will now be available in Portuguese.

Brazil is a hot emerging market for IT infrastructure, which will be critical to supporting communications services for two global events being hosted by Brazil: the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Equinix and Terremark have expanded their infrastructure in Sao Paulo, while private equity firm Silver Lake Partners has acquired a stake in Locaweb, Brazil's largest provider of hosting and cloud services.