Amazon Web Services (AWS) inaugurated the AWS South America (Chile) Region, its third infrastructure region in Latin America. The region, the result of an investment of more than US$4 billion, initially operates in early access for a select group of clients: BancoEstado, BTG Pactual, Cencosud, Consorcio, Itaú and Ripley.
In the coming weeks it will be available to all customers in the country and the world. AWS estimates that the construction and operation of the region will contribute more than US$7.5 billion to Chile’s GDP and support an average of 4,100 direct and indirect full-time jobs annually in areas such as construction, maintenance, engineering, telecommunications and data center operations.
The infrastructure starts with computing, storage, networking and database services, and will add artificial intelligence services such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker during its first year.
The region has three Availability Zones, independent infrastructure groups located in the Metropolitan Region, each with its own power, cooling and physical security, designed to minimize the risk of simultaneous interruptions and offer low latency to applications that operate in several zones at the same time.
For the financial industry, it also offers a local infrastructure option that supports compliance with the requirements of the Financial Market Commission (CMF) established in Chapter 20-7 of the Updated Compilation of Standards.
“At AWS, everything we build starts by listening to our customers, and what they told us was clear: they needed to keep their data in the country, more easily comply with regulatory requirements, and offer their own customers faster and more reliable experiences,” said Paula Bellizia, vice president of AWS for Latin America.
Startups and public sector: the first to use local infrastructure
Early adopters in the new region include Chilean startups such as Xepelin, Global66 and Betterly, which are already building their operations on AWS. In the public sector, the Electoral Service (Servel) and the General Treasury of the Republic use AWS to modernize their services.
The arrival of local infrastructure also has a direct impact for regulated companies: Javier Henríquez, Technology Manager at Consorcio Seguros, highlighted that the cloud “gives us the possibility of delivering a better service using analytics and artificial intelligence, making each process simpler and more agile for our clients.”
Joaquín Saul, CIO of BTG Pactual, pointed out that the new region “opens up opportunities for us to continue evolving and improving our processing capacity and resilience, in addition to exploring new applications of artificial intelligence.”
The region arrives at a time of rapid adoption of AI in the country: according to the study “Unlocking the potential of AI in Chile 2026”, prepared by Strand Partners for AWS, 45% of Chilean companies already use artificial intelligence, a company begins to adopt it every three minutes, and among those who use it, 92% report increases in productivity and 86% claim that they increased their income. Chile also occupies first place in the Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index (ILIA).
300,000 people trained in AI: AWS Entrena Chile until 2028
Along with the launch of the infrastructure, AWS announced the AWS Entrena Chile program, with which it committed to training 300,000 people free of charge in artificial intelligence and cloud computing until 2028, through courses in Spanish aimed at entrepreneurs, startups, students and professionals.
The program is developed in alliance with the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, the Ministry of Economy, the Municipality of Huechuraba, the San Sebastián University, and organizations such as País Digital, Fundación 99 and Morris & Opazo. It joins the more than 200,000 people that AWS has trained in cloud skills in Chile since 2017, and the AWS Academy, which today reaches nearly 112,000 students in 50 higher education institutions in the country.
AWS opened its first office in Santiago in 2017 and has since expanded its presence with an Amazon CloudFront edge location (2019), AWS Outposts and an AWS Ground Station antenna in Punta Arenas (2021), and AWS Local Zones and AWS Direct Connect in Santiago (2023). The new region is the largest step in that trajectory and makes Chile the third country in Latin America with AWS-scale cloud infrastructure, along with Brazil and Mexico.
