Amazon Web Services has expanded its edge infrastructure footprint in Southeast Asia with the general availability of a new Local Zone in Hanoi, Vietnam, bringing compute and storage services closer to end users in the region.
The Hanoi Local Zone is among the first AWS Local Zones in the Asia Pacific to support Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Local Snapshots, according to the company. The capability allows customers to store and back up data locally, helping them satisfy data residency requirements that are increasingly important for organizations operating in regulated industries across the region.
Local Zones function as edge locations designed to host applications that demand low latency for end users or on-premises installations. Each zone delivers a select set of services — including compute, storage and database offerings — in close proximity to population centers, often in markets where Amazon does not operate a full data center region. Every Local Zone is a child of a specific parent region and is managed by that region's control plane; the Hanoi zone is governed from Singapore. AWS has previously said Local Zones can be hosted in third-party data centers as well as in Amazon-owned facilities that are not part of a geographic cloud region.
The Hanoi launch adds to a global network of more than 30 Local Zones that AWS has deployed since introducing the concept in the United States in 2019, spanning North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific. The company has continued to broaden the program in 2026, having launched a Local Zone in Istanbul, Turkey, and announced plans for an Athens, Greece location slated to become available in July. Additional Local Zones are planned for the Netherlands, Colombia, Belgium, South Africa, Portugal, Kenya and Norway, though AWS has not disclosed timelines for those deployments.
The move underscores the intensifying competition among hyperscalers to extend cloud infrastructure into emerging Southeast Asian markets, where demand for low-latency services and local data storage is rising alongside digital transformation initiatives. By placing infrastructure in Hanoi, AWS is positioning itself to serve Vietnamese enterprises and public sector organizations that require data to remain within national borders while still accessing the broader capabilities of its Singapore region.