Amazon is opening a data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, its first in South America. The facility will provide the region with quicker access to the company’s Amazon Web Services, an “infrastructure cloud” that serves up various computing resources, including processing power and storage.

Amazon data centers already serve four regions in the U.S. and three others in Europe and Asia. AWS can be accessed from anywhere, but it helps to have a data center in your backyard. This reduces the number of failures on your path to the data center and lowers latency. You can also spread your applications across multiple regions to guard against outages. Each region is also divided into multiple “availability zones” designed not to fail at the same time.

“Zones are essentially a series of facilities that operate together in a region,” Amazon vice president of marketing, sales, and support Adam Selipsky recently told Wired. “They’re close enough together to have low latency connections for things like databases, but far enough apart that they fail independently of one another.”

Last month, Amazon opened a collection of data centers in Oregon. This joins data centers located in North California, Virginia, Dublin, Tokyo, and Singapore.

South America is the next logical step. Market research outfit Forrester predicts that online retail revenues in Brazil will double by 2016. Netflix — which uses AWS for at least a portion of its online operations in the US — recently introduced streaming video services in Brazil. And Sony is now offering its PlayStation Store to Brazilians, who number 194 million.

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