Run Generative AI inference with Amazon Bedrock in Asia Pacific (New Zealand)

AWS has expanded its generative AI platform, Amazon Bedrock, to the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, addressing local demand for accessible foundation models. The Auckland region (ap-southeast-6) now serves as a source for both geographic and global cross-region inference. This launch provides New Zealand-based developers and businesses with direct access to leading models like Anthropic's Claude Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku series, as well as Amazon's own Nova 2 Lite, without needing to route through distant data centers.

A key technical feature is the new cross-region inference capability, which allows API calls from Auckland to be processed in Sydney or Melbourne while maintaining data residency within Australia and New Zealand for compliance-sensitive workloads. The system offers two routing profiles: a geographic AU profile that keeps data within ANZ borders, and a global profile for higher throughput without residency restrictions. All data transmission occurs on AWS's private network, encrypted in transit, with logging handled through CloudTrail in the source region.

This infrastructure enables New Zealand organizations to build and scale AI applications with lower latency and stronger data governance. The addition of Auckland to the AU cross-region profile creates a three-region capacity pool (Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne), distributing inference loads more efficiently. For global operations, requests from Auckland can route to any supported AWS commercial region worldwide, providing maximum scalability for international applications.