AWS — Cape Town Africa Region

Amazon Web Services launched its Africa (Cape Town) region in April 2020 — the first major hyperscale public cloud region on the African continent. The region operates three availability zones, providing high-availability cloud infrastructure for African enterprises, governments, and developers. Before this launch, African organizations had to route their cloud workloads through European (Ireland, Frankfurt) or Middle Eastern (Bahrain) regions, adding significant latency. The Cape Town region hosts AWS AI services including SageMaker, Rekognition, Textract, and the full Bedrock model portfolio. Major customers include African banks (Absa, Standard Bank), telecoms, and the South African government. AWS has committed continued investment in the African market, recognizing the continent's young population and growing digital economy as a long-term growth opportunity.