Amazon plans to invest a total of US$1 billion in Indonesia over the span of the next 10 years. This was conveyed to Indonesian President Joko Widodo last week by Amazon vice president Werner Vogels, according to local media reports (link in Bahasa Indonesia), though questions regarding AWS’ regulatory compliance and tax payment in Indonesia still need to be sorted out.
The current proposal is about the firm’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The funds would, therefore, most likely be used to build the necessary infrastructure for that, such as data centres.
Takeaways
– Amazon follows Alibaba’s footsteps to build cloud computing data centres in Indonesia. The Chinese firm opened its first Alibaba Cloud data centre earlier this year.
– Indonesia is tightening controls on regulations which require sensitive user data to be stored in data centres within the country. This will spur the demand for cloud computing options that use local infrastructure.
– There’s no indication that Amazon will bring its ecommerce services to Indoensia just yet, although it has launched a number of services in Singapore. In India, Amazon has been available since 2013 and is now battling Flipkart, which was taken over by Walmart, for ecommerce dominance.
Editor: Ben Jiang
