In June 2026, we announced the upcoming launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure in Greece. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of the AWS Local Zone in Athens, Greece, bringing AWS compute, storage, and networking capabilities closer to customers in Greece. With this launch, you can process and store data in-country while delivering single-digit millisecond latency to your end users.

Since AWS launched its first Local Zone in Los Angeles in 2019, we have been steadily expanding our infrastructure footprint, with Local Zones now available in 30+ metro areas globally, helping customers meet data residency requirements and run applications in more locations. The Athens Local Zone brings a broader set of services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume types, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon EBS Snapshots closer to developers and organizations in Greece.

AWS infrastructure in Greece

Since 2020, we rapidly expanded infrastructure in Greece to better serve Greek customers:

• January 2020 – AWS launched Amazon CloudFront in Athens, bringing content delivery closer to customers in Greece.
• January 2021 – AWS opened its first corporate office in Athens to better support organizations of all sizes in Greece.
• March 2025 – AWS launched AWS Direct Connect in Athens, so customers can establish private, dedicated network connections between on-premises infrastructure and AWS with dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps connections with MACsec encryption.

The launch of the Athens Local Zone marks the latest investment in our multi-year commitment to help Greek enterprises, startups, and government agencies innovate and scale.

Why this matters for organizations in Greece

The Greek government and enterprises recognize the Athens Local Zone as critical infrastructure for strengthening the country’s digital economy and innovation ecosystem. Whether you’re a startup building AI-powered products, an enterprise modernizing legacy systems, or a public agency delivering citizen services, the Athens Local Zone provides the foundation to build locally and scale globally.

Data residency without complexity. Greek organizations in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, energy, and the public sector can now store and process data in-country on AWS without the complexity of building or managing local infrastructure. With Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Snapshots, you can keep data in Greece.

Lower latency for local users. You can now run applications that serve Greek end users, including real-time trading platforms, interactive gaming, and citizen-facing government services, on AWS infrastructure closer to end users, delivering the responsiveness these workloads demand.

Reduced operational overhead. The Athens Local Zone reduces the need to procure hardware or manage facilities. AWS manages the infrastructure, so you can build faster.

Consistent experience. Like all AWS infrastructure, the Athens Local Zone is built with the same physical and logical security controls customers rely on across AWS, supporting over 143 security standards and compliance certifications globally. You can build with the same console, Command Line Interface (CLI), and tools.

How customers are using Athens Local Zone

Here are a few examples of how early adopters are already using the Athens Local Zone:

Omilia is an Athens-headquartered company whose agentic CX platform powers conversational AI for global enterprises across 17 countries and 30 languages, processing over a billion customer interactions annually on AWS. Named a Leader in Conversational AI Platforms for Customer Service by Forrester in 2026, Omilia has spent two decades building the platform underneath its AI models. For Omilia, the Athens Local Zone brings workloads closer to their engineering teams, reducing latencies and in-turn helping them iterate and develop faster.

Profile Software is a global financial services ISV headquartered in Athens that builds mission-critical platforms for banks, investment firms, and insurance companies worldwide. With the Athens Local Zone, Profile delivers cloud-based scalability to its clients without compromising on compliance, keeping data and workloads local in Greece.

Skroutz is one of Greece’s largest online marketplaces, serving millions of users monthly and connecting buyers with thousands of merchants and millions of products. Skroutz runs on AWS to ship features faster and power AI across its platform. With local compute and storage now available in Athens, Skroutz can process data closer to their customers, delivering faster, more personalized experiences to Greek users.

Beyond these early adopters, organizations across energy, public sector, and healthcare are using the Athens Local Zone for operational telemetry, citizen-facing services with in-country data residency, and AI inference close to local data sources.

Available services

The Local Zones offer a broad set of AWS services to help you run production workloads locally. Here’s what you can use in the Athens Local Zone today:

Compute – Launch Amazon EC2 instances for compute-intensive, general-purpose, memory-optimized, and distributed AI/ML inference workloads with support for On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, and Savings Plans.

Storage – Store, process, and retrieve data locally with Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 (One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class), keeping application data, media assets, backups, and analytics datasets within the country to meet regulatory requirements. You can create and manage backups locally with Amazon EBS Snapshots, giving you faster recovery times and a business continuity strategy that stays in-country.

Networking – Build isolated network environments with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and distribute traffic across instances with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

Beyond these core services, you can run containerized applications using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and manage infrastructure at scale with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Shield, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Transform MGN, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS CloudFormation. The Athens Local Zone maintains a resilient, high-bandwidth connection to the Europe (Frankfurt) Region, which means you can reach every service available in that Region using the same APIs, tools, and operational workflows you’re familiar with.

AWS Partners bringing local expertise

AWS Partners in Greece, including consulting and technology partners such as EPAM Systems and Kyndryl, bring deep technical knowledge and local market experience to help customers build on the Athens Local Zone.

EPAM Systems is a Premier AWS Partner that works with clients across multiple countries. With the AWS Local Zone in Athens delivering single-digit millisecond latency, EPAM builds and deploys cloud and AI solutions for its clients in Greece with faster performance and local data processing. EPAM Systems is focused on helping organizations modernize their infrastructure while meeting data residency and compliance requirements.

Kyndryl is a Premier AWS Partner and enterprise technology services provider that helps Greek enterprises, from public sector organizations to regulated financial institutions, migrate and modernize on AWS. With the Athens Local Zone, Kyndryl’s clients can build resilient, secure, and performant environments locally that address data residency and regulatory requirements while accelerating their cloud journeys.

Get started with AWS Local Zone in Athens

To get started, opt-in to the Athens Local Zone through AWS Global View and create a Local Zone subnet in the Amazon VPC console. From there, launch EC2 instances, provision EBS volumes, store objects in S3, and deploy containers, all with the same APIs and tools you use today. Refer to the AWS Local Zones User Guide and AWS Local Zones FAQs for more details.

New to Local Zones? Our step-by-step tutorials walk you through common deployment patterns and get you up to speed quickly with the Introduction to AWS Local Zones course on AWS Skill Builder.

Want to learn more about the storage capabilities now available in Local Zones? Read our technical deep-dives on Amazon S3 in Local Zones and Amazon EBS Snapshots.

The Athens Local Zone integrates with your existing AWS Outpost deployments, AWS Direct Connect connections, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and maintains connectivity to AWS services in the Region for flexible hybrid and multi-region architectures.

For detailed pricing information on services available in the Athens Local Zone, visit the AWS Local Zones pricing page. To learn more about AWS Local Zones, visit the AWS Local Zones locations page.

Have questions or feedback? Leave a comment, we’d love to hear how you’re using AWS Local Zones in Athens, Greece.

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