How Many Data Centers Does AWS Have? Amazon Web Services' Reach

Amazon Web Services operates its own data centers and largely owns its infrastructure, but it also leases data center capacity from colocation providers.

The company organizes its physical locations into geographic regions, each made up of multiple availability zones that contain one or more data centers. So, AWS does not talk about single data centers in isolation.

An AWS region is a defined geographic area. Each AWS region contains multiple availability zones, with a minimum of three availability zones per region.

An availability zone is not a single data center. It is a cluster of data centers designed for high availability, independent power, physical security, and low-latency connections between zones in the same region.

Recent data suggests that AWS operates over 900 individual data center facilities worldwide.

With more than 30 AWS regions and over 100 availability zones globally, the total number of physical facilities is far larger than the regional count suggests, but AWS does not publish an exact number of data centers.

AWS has built one of the largest global networks in cloud computing.

Key regions include US East in Northern Virginia, US West in Northern California, multiple Asia Pacific regions, South America, and Europe.

AWS also announced plans for specialized deployments such as the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to meet regional compliance needs.

Not all AWS infrastructure looks like a traditional data center.

AWS edge locations and local zones bring computing power closer to customers to reduce latency. These sites support services like content delivery, data transfer, and access management, but they are smaller than full data centers.

AWS data centers support a massive range of services.

These include core AWS services like Amazon Elastic Block Store, AWS Lambda, machine learning tools, AI services, and enterprise applications. The same infrastructure also powers developer tools, storage, networking, and artificial intelligence workloads.

High availability is the core design goal. By spreading workloads across multiple AZs, AWS customers avoid relying on a single data center.

If one facility fails, traffic shifts automatically, keeping services online. This design supports sufficient capacity and consistent performance at scale.

AWS remains the largest cloud provider by infrastructure scale. Other cloud providers also use regions and availability zones, but AWS provides a more extensive global infrastructure footprint than any other cloud provider.

That scale supports cost effective services, high performance computing, and a consistent hybrid experience for on premises systems.

Running hundreds of data centers requires enormous energy.

AWS invests heavily in renewable energy and clean energy projects to improve energy efficiency.

The company aims to match its electricity use with renewable sources, reducing the environmental impact of its growing demand.

AWS continues building new facilities as demand for cloud services, artificial intelligence, and machine learning increases. AWS designs its infrastructure for global reach, reliability, and scale.

We created this article in conjunction with AI technology, then made sure it was fact-checked and edited by a HowStuffWorks editor.