The recent referendum vote in favor of the UK leaving the European Union will not put a dampener on Amazon’s plans to launch its first UK data center, the company confirmed.
Speaking to Bloomberg, the retailer and cloud services company said it was “committed” to opening its London data center by early next year, after announcing its plans in 2015.
Britain: And you’re done
“We’re watching the situation but I can’t speculate how everything is going to unfold,” Stephen Orban, head of enterprise strategy at Amazon Web Services, said.
He added: “Demand for all our services is growing across all Europe. For us it’s business as usual.”
However, customers of AWS and other cloud services have raised concerns about the unknowns involved with the UK’s eventual leave from the union - after Article 50 is called, the UK has two years to ‘Brexit’.
With the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules set to come into force in 2018, there is a debate over whether the UK would be bound by it and what that could mean for businesses.
Charles Phillips, Chief Executive of AWS-client Infor, told Bloomberg: “We were considering using the U.K. one, mostly for U.K. customers…. It’s less likely given what’s going on. I don’t want to rush in there and then have customers tell us to do something different.”
Instead, Infor plans to keep hosting British customers’ data on Amazon’s Dublin center. Phillips added: “Most of our customers we know are OK with Ireland. We don’t know if they’re OK with the UK.”