Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened its Israel cloud region, its third in the Middle East, the company announced in a press release. The move comes as AWS looks to invest USD 7.2 bn in Israel by 2037, CIO reports.

The details: The Tel Aviv cloud region, first announced in June 2021, features three availability zones — which contain data centers — and will support services including compute, storage, networking, and security.

Background: AWS introduced cloud regions in Bahrain in 2019 and the UAE in 2022. AWS began investing in Israel in 2019 with Amazon CloudFront and has since launched AWS Outposts and AWS Direct Connect. The Tel Aviv region expands AWS’s global availability zones to 102 across 32 regions.

OTHER DATA CENTER NEWS- Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala has invested in US-based data center firm Aligned Data Centers, positioning itself as “a minority partner alongside majority partners managed by Macquarie Asset Management,” according to a company press release. The USD 276 bn fund did not disclose additional details about the transaction.

Where the money will go: The funds willsupport Aligned’s expansion in the pan-American market, Mubadala CEO of Real Estate and Infrastructure Investments Khaled Abdulla Al Qubaisi was quoted as saying in the press release.

About Aligned: The data center firm provides both scale data centers and build-to-scale solutions, and is slated to have upwards of 2.5 GW of capacity across over 40 data centers once developments are completed, the release added. Despite a focus on North American operations, Aligned recently expanded to Latin America with the acquisition of regional firm ODATA. The outfit is ramping up operations in Latin America and currently operates data centers in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

Mubadala has been on a data center investment spree: May saw the fund invest USD 500 mn in US-based broadband and telecom company Brightspeed. This was preceded in 2022 by a USD 350 mn investment in Asia-focused data center company Princeton Digital Group. The sovereign fund also injected GBP 800 mn into UK’s CityFibre.

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