ATHENS – In another coup for the New Democracy government that has been chasing foreign investors during the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it is planning to create its first local zone in Greece.

That will be in the capital, the company’s subsidiary developing one of the world’s foremost technological cloud platforms, planning to create zones in 32 metropolitan areas in 26 countries.

The investment in Greece will be up to 200 million euros ($227.12 million,) said Kathimerini, now 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 an AWS type of infrastructure placing computing capacity, data storage, data bases and other services closer to major cities and industrial hubs, the paper explained.

That speeds 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 said.

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.