In advance of its Kindle Fire tablet launch, Amazon this week opened a new data center in Oregon.
"We have just opened up another AWS Region," Amazon's Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. "This one is located in the Pacific Northwest are of the United States, in the beautiful state of Oregon, and offers low-cost, low-latency access to our services from the Western portion of the U.S. We're always trying to provide you with services at the lowest possible price."
This is AWS's seventh data region and the fourth in the U.S. It will support all AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), among others.
Next week, Amazon will launch the $199 Kindle Fire, which the company is pushing as a multimedia tablet that will provide easy access to movies, TV shows, e-books, and more—and will likely tax Amazon's already busy servers. The device will utilize a special "split" browser, known as Silk, that will partially live in the cloud thanks to Amazon EC2 and partially live on the Fire.
Lawmakers raised privacy concerns over the data-tracking capabilities of the Silk browser, but Amazon said Silk can be turned off and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said after an evaluation that it was "generally satisfied" with Silk's privacy features.
According to Data Center Knowledge, that the new facility "has allowed Amazon to create a second availability zone in the U.S.-West region, offering additional options for users to house and serve data across several geographic areas to improve redundancy and reliability."
The new addition will also help performance, the blog said. "In a multi-region setup, when one region experiences performance problems, customers can shift workloads to an unaffected region."
Facebook, which also has an Oregon data center, recently opened its first data center outside of the U.S. in a Swedish town 62 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The company chose the frigid locale of Lulea because chilly temperatures are necessary to cool the servers, and the new facility is expected to improve performance for its European users.
Facebook also has servers in California and Virginia, and is building another one in North Carolina.
Amazon didn't confirm the exact location of its new complex, but Data Center Knowledge said local media reports indicate that it's in the town of Umatilla.