Amazon WebServices announced that the company will launch a new regional data center in Hong Kong to accelerate its expansion in China.

By far, AWS has eight service regions in Asia Pacific and China, including Beijing, Mumbai, Ningxia, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Hong Kong. At present, AWS has 64 applicable areas in 21 regions around the world. For the next step, the company will open 12 more applicable areas and four more regions, including Bahrain, Cape Town, Jakarta and Milan

Peter DeSantis, vice president for AWS global infrastructure and customer support, said that Hong Kong is a globally recognized financial technology hub and it is a popular place for start-up companies to develop their businesses. Many customers asked AWS to establish a local region in Hong Kong, so that they can set up their businesses on local cloud. By launching AWS region in Hong Kong, the company hopes to make customers more innovative and improve their user experience in the next ten years.

However, AWS also faces competition of strong rivals like Google and Microsoft. It is said that Google's cloud platform GCP opened a regional data center in Hong Kong in November 2018; and Microsoft's cloud platform Azure also opened its East Asia regional data center in Hong Kong. In addition, the company is expected to meet challenge from Chinese local cloud service providers like Aliyun and Tencent Cloud.