ATHENS – Picking the Greek capital as one of 32 metropolitan areas in the world for so-called local zones for computer capacity and data bases, Amazon Web Services (AWS) inaugurated its offices there and said Greece would play a leading role in the expanding high technoloy world.

That came during an event that drew US Ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt, General Manager of AWS Europe Public Sector Cameron Brooks and Development & Investments Minister Adonis Georgiadis.

“We are interested in Greece playing a leading role in the new world that is being created. To achieve this, the presence of Amazon is very important. And we are here to help make it even bigger,” said Georgiadis, reported Kathimerini.

Brooks noted that “the progress we see here in Greece is fascinating. We look forward to continuing our development and to continue to create opportunities here, in cooperation with the embassy and the ministry.”

After thanking Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Georgiadis for the “fantastic partnership that they have built with all of the American technology companies here in Greece,” Pyatt noted that “AWS has been a great example of how American investment and American tech companies are leading the way in terms of Greece’s economic recovery, the return to growth, but also the way in which Greece has leveraged technology to accelerate its response to the global pandemic, and also, very importantly, to begin attracting back to Greece, some of the talented Greek citizens who left to other countries during the years of economic crisis.”

The plans were elaborated on in February, giving the New Democracy government another coup as it’s been chasing foreign investors during the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.

The investment in Greece will be up to 200 million euros ($220.82 million,) the paper said then, confirming the deal that was first announced in December, 2021  at the annual AWS re:Invent conference in the US, by Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels.

Local zones are going to be bring critical services and cloud storage close to major cities and industrial hubs as technology is advancing at an even rapid pace and essential to everyday operations of infrastructure.

AWS will speed applications for clients to under one-hundredth of a second, close to the final users and allows an unhindered experience in applications such as real-time gaming, multimedia and entertainment content creation, livestreaming, assimilations, enhanced and virtual reality applications.

It also means that clients won’t have to pay to create, operate and maintain the infrastructure and will have ultra-fast applications, meaning local zones can let companies in domains of healthcare, financial services and the broader public sector store their data within the country, the paper also said then.

Local zones may also be used by clients wishing to store their data locally and run specific applications at in-house data centers, while utilizing the AWS services and making the most of the very fast response time such hybrid applications provide.