The AWS blog announces the Middle East AWS instance coming in 2019. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-the-middle-east/

“Middle East Region by Early 2019

Today, I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS Region in the Middle East by early 2019. The new Region will be based in Bahrain, will be comprised of three Availability Zones at launch, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in the Middle East.”

What is not in the official blog post is the green data center effort and thankfully Werner Vogel posted those details here. http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/09/aws-region-middle-east.html

”In addition to infrastructure, offices, and jobs another investment AWS is making for its customers in the Middle East, and around the world is to run our business in the most environmentally friendly way. One of the important criteria in launching this AWS Region is the opportunity to power it with renewable energy. We chose Bahrain in part due to the country's focus on executing renewable energy goals and its readiness to construct a new solar power facility to meet our power needs. I'm pleased to announce that the Bahrain Energy and Water Authority (EWA) will construct a solar farm that will supply renewable energy to power this infrastructure Region. EWA expects to bring the 100 MW solar farm online in 2019, making it the country's first utility-scale renewable energy project.”

AWS joins the rest of the big boys and discusses environmental criteria as part of its data center site selection.

And you can guess that others are feeling the pressure. It wasn’t too long ago that having a green data center was only being discussed by Google. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and AWS all discuss the environmental impact of its data centers.