Amazon Web Services — EU-CENTRAL-1 Frankfurt Region

Amazon Web Services EU-CENTRAL-1 — the Frankfurt region — is AWS’s flagship European AI compute hub, launched in October 2014 and expanded continuously to become one of the largest public cloud regions globally. Operating across three availability zones in the Rhine-Main region, it is the primary EU cloud region for German enterprises, financial institutions, and organizations requiring German data residency under the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG).

The Frankfurt region hosts the full suite of AWS AI services — Amazon Bedrock (with Claude, Llama, and Titan model access), SageMaker, Rekognition, Comprehend, and Translate — under EU AI Act compliance frameworks. It is the primary region for German financial institutions including Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, and Allianz, which rely on Frankfurt for GDPR-compliant AI workloads. The Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin) has approved AWS Frankfurt for regulated financial services.

AWS has invested more than €17 billion in German infrastructure and supports over 17,000 full-time jobs in Germany. The Frankfurt region is central to AWS’s European strategy: Frankfurt’s position at the heart of DE-CIX (the world’s largest internet exchange by data throughput) provides unparalleled connectivity to 1,000+ networks. All facilities are matched to 100% renewable energy through PPAs with German and European wind and solar projects.