AWS Opens Chile Cloud Region With Over $4 Billion Investment Plan

Amazon Web Services opened its first cloud infrastructure Region in Chile to select customers on November 11, 2026, Amazon announced (AMZN ). Amazon plans to invest more than $4 billion in the country to support the Region, which is operating in early access ahead of general availability expected by the end of 2026.

The South America (Chile) Region is AWS’s third in Latin America, joining the South America (São Paulo) and Mexico (Central) Regions. AWS says its global network spans 39 infrastructure Regions.

Amazon estimates that the investment will contribute more than $7.5 billion to Chile’s gross domestic product and support an average of 4,100 full-time-equivalent jobs annually across telecommunications, construction, electricity generation and data-center operations.

The Chilean deployment is designed around at least three isolated and physically separate Availability Zones. These groups of data centers have independent power, cooling and physical security, with high-speed fiber-optic networks connecting the zones.

Local Capacity for Regulated Workloads

Chilean organizations had increasingly been running technology infrastructure on AWS from other Regions. AWS expects local workloads and content storage to lower latency for end users in Chile, across the Southern Cone and in the neighboring markets of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Peru. That area collectively represents 123 million people and approximately $1.5 trillion in GDP.

The local infrastructure also addresses regulatory demand. Chile’s financial market regulator has established requirements for banks processing critical workloads with cloud services, while the country’s new data protection law creates additional data-residency obligations. The Region gives organizations in-country infrastructure to help meet those requirements.

Early customers include BancoEstado de Chile, BTG, Cencosud, Consorcio, Itaú and Ripley. BTG Pactual chief information officer Joaquín Saul said the Region “opens opportunities for us to keep evolving and improving our processing capacity and resilience, as well as to explore new applications of artificial intelligence.”

The initial service lineup covers core compute, storage, networking and database services. AWS expects foundational AI and machine-learning services, including Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI, to become available within the Region’s first year rather than at the opening.

AWS already counts AI users among its Chilean customers. It reported that LATAM Airlines (LTM ) uses Amazon Bedrock for a virtual assistant that resolves more than 32% of call-center interactions without an agent transfer, while Copec’s multi-agent AI system on WhatsApp delivered eight-times-faster responses and a threefold reduction in abandonment.

Workforce and Resource Commitments

AWS says it has trained more than 200,000 people in Chile in cloud skills since 2017 and is targeting free AI and cloud training for 300,000 learners by 2028. AWS Entrena Chile, launched in September 2026 with backing from Chile’s Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Economy, is part of that effort. AWS Academy reaches more than 111,000 students across 50 Chilean higher-education institutions.

The data centers will be primarily air-cooled and will not require ongoing cooling water in operations. Amazon projects that, when fully operational, they will be seven times more efficient than the industry average.

AWS says its first Chilean water-efficiency project, launched in August 2024 with climate technology company Kilimo and local farmers, is intended to transition approximately 67 hectares in the Maipo basin from flood irrigation to drip irrigation, with projected savings of about 200 million liters of water annually.

The early phase is therefore centered on local core capacity and regulatory needs rather than a complete in-country AI offering. General availability and the addition of Bedrock and SageMaker AI remain the next milestones in the Region’s commercial rollout.