AWS Opens Chile Cloud Region With $4 Billion Investment Plan

AWS plans to invest $4 billion in a Chile cloud region that opened to select customers, with general availability expected by the end of 2025. It is AWS's third region in Latin America, following São Paulo, Brazil, and Mexico.

What can customers use today?

AWS opened the region with four core service groups: compute, storage, networking and databases. It will add its artificial intelligence offerings within one year of launch, giving technical teams a staged rather than complete service rollout.

That sequencing matters for workload planning: teams can start on core infrastructure, but they cannot assume the region's AI offerings are available on day one.

Early adopters include:

• BancoEstado de Chile
• BTG
• Cencosud
• Consorcio
• Itaú
• Ripley

For that first cohort, AWS has separated today's core infrastructure from the AI roadmap.

BTG Pactual CIO Joaquín Saul said: “The new AWS Region in Chile 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 firm is an investment bank and global financial services group in Latin America. His priorities are capacity, resilience and new AI applications.

What changes for regulated workloads?

Paula Bellizia, AWS vice president for Latin America, set out both the customer rationale and the operating standard. Her comments link the region's commercial case to customer demand and its technical specification to AWS's common regional template.

“At AWS, everything we build starts with listening to our customers, and what they told us was clear: they needed to keep their data in the country, meet regulatory requirements more easily, and give their own customers faster, more reliable experiences.

Every AWS Region is built to the same security and resilience standards used by the most demanding organizations in the world, and starting today that infrastructure is here, in Chile, and from Chile to Latin America and the world.”

For cloud buyers, the local option combines country-level data placement with AWS's stated security and resilience template. Bellizia also frames Chile as a base from which services can reach Latin America and the rest of the world. For compliance teams, she turns data residency into a purchasing requirement rather than a standalone feature.

How long has AWS been building this?

AWS has worked on a Chile region since at least 2017, and in January 2024 it received approval for a $205 million data center project in Santiago. In July that year, it received approval for a second Santiago data center, also set to receive $205 million. The company announced full-region plans in 2025 and has now opened the region selectively.

The two Santiago projects carry $205 million each, or $410 million in combined planned investment. AWS's broader regional investment plan is $4 billion.

What changes at the facilities?

The Santiago data centers will use air cooling as their primary method and will not need ongoing cooling water, AWS said. The company claims they