Amazon to introduce AWS to Indonesian market

As part of a major foray into the Southeast Asian digital economy, Amazon is planning a $1.3 billion investment in Indonesia spread out over a 10-year period.

In particular, the American tech giant will introduce its cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), to the Indonesian market. The operation is part of the company’s plan to support the 1,000 local start-ups with a total value of $10 billion that are expected to be launched with the government’s backing by 2020.

But Amazon will face stiff competition from Alibaba, which opened its first data centre in Indonesia in early 2018 and has invested $1.1 billion in Tokopedia, Indonesia’s largest online marketplace.

Since 2016 the Chinese giant has also owned Lazada Group, an Indonesian e-commerce platform that operates throughout Southeast Asia.

The digital economy in the region is projected to be worth more than US $200 billion by 2025, with Indonesia expected to make up the lion’s share of that market.