Planned Amazon investment is ‘vote of confidence’ in economy, says PM

Amazon’s announcement that it wished to situate in Greece one of its new 11 Amazon Web Services Local Zones in Europe was “one more vote of confidence in the prospects of the Greek economy,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Friday.

Speaking in a teleconference with AWS Vice President for Global Public Policy Michael Punke, Mitsotakis underlined that Greece is changing rapidly and becoming a hub for investments in high technology. He said it was very encouraging that major global players were choosing Greece as a place to establish a permanent presence.

“We have a ‘cloud first’ policy and we intend to establish Greece as a centre for data storage. The government is fully aligned to support this vision and I am very happy that you are responding to this and that you will significantly increase your presence in Greece,” he said, describing the great efforts being made for the digitalization of the Greek state.

Mitsotakis noted that many people were choosing to work in Greece due to Covid, adding that Greece was greatly facilitating such digital nomads by issuing visas allowing them to work anywhere.

“We have an excellently designed vaccination programme, which is fully digital. We are systematically increasing online services for businesses and citizens. If you ask the average Greek what is the most successful thing this government has done, they will reply that it is the digital transformation,” Mitsotakis said.

Earlier, a government announcement said that Greece will be the site of one of 11 AWS Local Zones that the company is planning to establish in Europe. It said this move confirmed the country’s position as a regional technology hub, where major companies make strategic investments in infrastructure that will support the fourth industrial revolution and the economy of the future.

Local Zones reduce the latency for apps and offer greater computing power, digital storage space, data bases and other services through infrastructure locate near large urban, industrial and technological centres.

Punke said Greece was chosen partly because of the government’s meticulous work in the preparatory process but also because of the change seen in the Greek economy compared to the previous decade.

Digital Governance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis said that this was a result of a whole range of changes and political initiatives taken in recent years, including the decision to give priority to cloud computing. He said that a quarter of the EU’s Recovery Fund financing for Greece will go toward digital services and the cloud. [AMNA]