Amazon Web Services said it will open data centers in Sweden next year to serve customers in Nordic countries such as Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway.
The new Stockholm region includes three “Availability Zones,” which are independent groupings of data centers within a larger area with redundant power and connectivity. AWS now has 42 Availability Zones across 16 infrastructure regions worldwide, with plans to add five more zones in France and China this year.
“An AWS Region in Stockholm enables Swedish and Nordic customers, with local latency or data sovereignty requirements, to move the rest of their applications to AWS and enjoy cost and agility advantages across their entire application portfolio,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
In a press release announcing the new Sweden data centers, Amazon highlighted some of the Nordic-based enterprises that use AWS, such as IKEA, Nokia, Scania, and Telenor. In addition, numerous startups throughout the region use AWS, the company says.
AWS already had a presence in Sweden, prior to this announcement. In 2014, it opened an office in Stockholm, and a year later it opened an office in Espoo, Finland. Today, a variety of teams work out of these offices, helping people move operations to AWS.
In addition to its ubiquity in the online retail world, Amazon has established itself as king of the cloud. Amazon Web Services topped $12 billion in sales in 2016, up 55 percent from the same period last year. That’s enough to make the Amazon division a significant company on its own.
According to a recent study, AWS has maintained a more than 40 percent share of the cloud market amid a big jump in the overall size of the market. AWS’ top three competitors, Microsoft, Google and IBM are growing their market share, but they still only represent 23 percent of the cloud market combined.
