President Uhuru Kenyatta met with visiting executives of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS is an enterprise of the American e-commerce giant Amazon that offers cloud computing services.
The President’s meeting with the Amazon Web Services executives led by Vice President Teresa Carlson was a follow up to a discussion the Head of State had with the group during his official visit to Washington last year.
During the meeting, the AWS Vice President applauded Kenya for the passage of the new data law and informed him of Amazon’s plans to set up an “edge location” in Nairobi.
An edge location is where end-users access services located on Amazon Web Services.
Ms Carlson said the new data law paves the way for the organization’s investment that will enable Nairobi to join other global cities as an edge location.
President Kenyatta welcomed the establishment of an edge location in the country by AWS and assured that Kenya has the requisite infrastructure and educated young population that will benefit from the business opportunities and jobs that will be created.
“I am delighted to welcome AWS’s investment in Kenya. The launch of Amazon CloudFront will put us in the forefront of accelerated innovation – enabling startups, enterprises and our government agencies to focus on building the best user experience,” the President said.
He added: “Kenya is an innovator in digital financial services in Africa. Having advanced cloud infrastructure in the country will support our ability to flourish as a nation and reach our potential as one of Africa’s fastest-growing digital economies.”
The Head of State noted that the investment by Amazon will help strengthen Kenya’s position as a regional business hub.
“This is key for us especially now that we are going digital on almost everything. We are currently building the digital infrastructure and we welcome any support that we can get from you,” the President told the Amazon team.
Ms Carlson said her organization will also provide training in digital skills and help in the creation of quality jobs for the youth in Kenya.
The AWS cloud platform offers featured services to millions of customers including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies.
Some of the benefits of the edge location provided by AWS include giving businesses and web application developers an easy and cost-effective way to distribute data housed in Kenya to thousands of users with low latency and high data transfer speeds.
The service will allow businesses quick and reliable access to their information, which improves the quality of the internet to the end-user and help reduce the cost of transferring data.
