Amazon Web Services — Melbourne Australia Region (ap-southeast-4)

Amazon Web Services launched its Melbourne, Australia region (ap-southeast-4) in January 2023 — the second full AWS region in Australia, complementing the original Sydney region (ap-southeast-2) that has operated since 2012. The Melbourne region enables Australian organizations requiring geographic redundancy across Australian data centers, and serves state and federal government agencies under the Australian Government’s cloud policy framework.

The Australian Government’s Digital Transformation Agency and various state government departments have prioritized cloud services with Australian data residency. The Melbourne region directly addresses Victoria’s government digital infrastructure requirements and provides lower latency for Melbourne-based enterprises compared to routing through Sydney.

AWS has invested over $4.5 billion in Australian infrastructure across Sydney and Melbourne. The Melbourne region hosts AWS AI services including Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and Amazon Q, supporting Australia’s rapidly growing AI adoption across banking (ANZ, NAB, Westpac), insurance, mining, and healthcare sectors. Australian enterprises increasingly deploy AI models trained in the US but serving inference locally to meet latency and data residency requirements.