AWS Brings Compute, Storage, and AI Services to Athens with New Local Zone, Available July 2026

[Media Alert] Athens, Greece - June 16, 2026 - Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that its new Local Zone in Athens, Greece will be generally available in July. The first customers are already using the Local Zone ahead of launch to run low-latency real-time gaming experiences, local data processing use cases, and fast content delivery, and other organizations interested in early access can contact their AWS account team.

Local Zones place AWS cloud infrastructure - including compute, storage, networking, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and databases - in or near major cities. The new Athens Local Zone enables organizations to store and process workloads within Greece and meet data residency requirements. It delivers low-latency performance with the reliability, security, and familiar tools they expect from AWS. Customers can modernize legacy workloads and have control over where they run, access powerful compute instances, and the full breadth of available AWS services, including managed infrastructure and enterprise-grade security, without the cost and complexity of managing on-premises infrastructure.

Why local infrastructure matters
Most workloads run in AWS Regions, which are geographic locations where AWS clusters data centers to serve customers, but some workloads require infrastructure to be located closer to end users or within specific geographic boundaries. Financial institutions processing high-frequency transactions, healthcare providers managing sensitive patient data, and government agencies running citizen-facing services all face the same challenge: their applications need to be fast, their workloads need to stay local, and their infrastructure needs to meet strict regulatory requirements. When an AWS infrastructure Region isn't close enough to meet these requirements, organizations have traditionally procured, operated, and maintained their own IT infrastructure, which means managing physical facilities, maintaining hardware, and staffing the specialized teams required to keep systems secure, compliant, and operational. AWS Local Zones eliminate this complexity by extending AWS-managed infrastructure to major cities, delivering the same reliability and security customers expect from AWS Regions.

The AWS Local Zone in Athens delivers single-digit millisecond latency for applications serving end users in Greece and seamless connectivity to the full breadth of AWS services through a high-bandwidth, secure backbone connection to nearby AWS Regions.

The AWS Local Zone in Athens will also be one of the first globally to offer Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Local Snapshots, giving customers local object storage and snapshot capabilities to help meet data residency requirements.

Greek government welcomes the investment

"The AWS Local Zone is not simply another technology investment. It is critical infrastructure that strengthens the capabilities of the Greek economy in the era of artificial intelligence," said Kostis Hatzidakis, Deputy Prime Minister. "Greece has made significant progress in digital transformation, both in the public sector and in building a modern innovation ecosystem. We are now intensifying our efforts to ensure that by 2030, Greece is at the forefront of Europe in the adoption of AI and emerging technologies. AWS's continued expansion in Greece underscores the growing momentum of our country as a regional hub for digital innovation."

The AWS Local Zone in Athens represents the latest milestone in AWS's sustained commitment to Greece, which began in 2020 with an AWS CloudFront edge location in Athens, followed by a local office in 2021 and the activation of AWS Direct Connect in Athens in 2025.As part of Amazon's goal to reach net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040, Amazon has invested in 8 utility-scale wind and solar farms in Greece. Once completed, these projects will provide an estimated 656 MW of new carbon-free energy capacity - enough carbon-free energy to power the equivalent of more than 350,000 Greek households annually.

"With the new AWS Local Zone in Athens, we're giving any organization operating in Greece the tools and capabilities they need to deliver faster innovative experiences on home soil," said Thanasis Patsakas, Country Manager for AWS in Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. "We've designed AWS Local Zones to support a broad range of use cases - from public sector services that need to meet strict data residency requirements, to trading applications that need to respond quickly to market fluctuations, to interactive live event and gaming experiences. We're excited to see what our customers do next."

Organizations in Greece welcome in the Athens Local Zone

Omilia's agentic CX platform powers conversational AI for global enterprises. Headquartered in Athens and operating across 17 countries and 30 languages, the company handles more than a billion customer interactions a year on AWS at over 95% semantic accuracy. In 2026, Forrester named Omilia a Leader in Conversational AI Platforms for Customer Service. "We built Omilia in Athens and scaled it to the world on AWS. In AI, models evolve fast, but what endures is the platform underneath. That's what we've spent two decades building, and it's why we can train and deploy bespoke AI models for global brands at speed," said Marios Fakiolas, Chief Technology Officer, Omilia. "Having AWS infrastructure locally in Greece means we can develop and iterate on that platform closer to the team that owns it, with lower latency, while continuing to serve customers across the globe. Competing at the highest level in AI, that combination of local presence and global scale is exactly what we need."

Profile Software is a global Financial Services ISV headquartered in Athens, leveraging AWS to power its solutions for banks, investment firms, and insurance companies worldwide. "As an organization delivering mission-critical platforms to financial institutions, we welcome the launch of the AWS Local Zone in Athens," said Dr. Apostolos Kritikopoulos, Group Chief Technology Officer, Profile Software. "This infrastructure milestone allows us to bring the full power of AWS even closer to our customers in Greece and the broader region. We combine the scalability and innovation of the cloud with the low-latency performance and data residency that regulated financial services require. We look forward to continuing to build on AWS and helping our clients accelerate their digital transformation."

Skroutz is Greece's most visited online marketplace, serving millions of users monthly and connecting buyers with thousands of merchants and millions of products. Skroutz runs on AWS to serve customers better, deliver new platform features faster, leverage AI, and fuel its expansion into new European markets. "AWS has been fundamental to our ability to scale and innovate at the pace our customers expect," said Apollon Oikonomopoulos, CIO, Skroutz. "AWS infrastructure located in Athens, coupled with access to AWS's global infrastructure is exciting for us. Access to local compute and storage capabilities will help us deliver even faster, more personalized experiences to our Greek users and support our data processing needs closer to home while we continue to use AWS global infrastructure to grow our business across Europe."

AWS Partners look to the Athens Local Zone to help customers innovate

EPAM Systems is a Premier AWS Partner with presence in multiple countries. "With the AWS Local Zone in Athens delivering single-digit millisecond latency, we can now build and deploy cloud and AI solutions for our clients in Greece with faster performance and local data processing," said George Papadimitrakis, Director, Client Partner, Greece Market, EPAM Systems. "We're focused on helping organizations modernize their infrastructure while meeting data residency and compliance requirements."

Kyndryl is a Premier AWS Partner and a provider of enterprise technology services. "The AWS Local Zone in Athens strengthens our ability to support Greek enterprises, from public sector organizations to regulated financial institutions, in their cloud migration and modernization efforts," said Apostolos Leonidopoulos, Managing Director, Kyndryl Greece and Cyprus. "With AWS infrastructure now available locally, we can help customers build more resilient, secure, and performant environments that meet their data residency and regulatory requirements."

The new AWS Local Zone in Athens joins AWS's global network of Local Zones across more than 30 metro areas on six continents. Like all AWS infrastructure, the Athens Local Zone is built with the same physical and logical security controls customers rely on across AWS, supporting over 143 security standards and compliance certifications globally.

To get started with the AWS Local Zones, visit aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/localzones/locations.