It doesn’t take more than a passing glance at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) case studies page to understand the reasoning behind the latest addition to its global expansion course. Featured prominently at the top row is Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., one of the several big-name South Korean companies that rely on the public cloud to support their operations. Setting up shop locally holds the potential to grow the list considerably.

Amazon’s closest data center is currently in Japan, which means that user requests have to travel nearly a thousand miles before reaching its infrastructure and vice versa. That creates a significant delay that undermines the appeal of AWS for use cases like real-time data processing that require nearly instantaneous response times. The issue grows even bigger for companies in South Korea’s regulated industries, which are outright unable to run certain workloads on the platform due to laws against transferring sensitive information to foreign jurisdictions.

Launching a local data center solves both problems at the same stroke. Organizations with latency-sensitive applications have especially much to gain thanks to the fact that the move will enable Amazon to take full advantage of South Korea’s world-renowned telecommunications infrastructure, which should translate into much faster connectivity. But Jeff Bezos’s firm likely won’t be the only major cloud provider offering these benefits when its local facility launches early next year.

Microsoft Corp. has been rumored to be mulling a similar expansion of its rivaling public cloud to the peninsula since last September. And with two of the industry’s top infrastructure-as-a-service providers eyeing the South Korean market, the third, Google Inc., can’t be far behind. The trio are locked in a fierce competitive race that most recently saw Amazon announce plans to open an Indian facility to better compete with Redmond, which operates no fewer than three local data centers.

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