Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met this morning with Panos Panay, Senior Vice President of Amazon, at the Maximos Mansion.

During the meeting, the Prime Minister was briefed by Mr. Panay on the implementation of Amazon Web Services’ investment regarding the creation of a new Local Zone in Athens, which will become generally available in July.

The new infrastructure will enable businesses and organizations operating in Greece to store and process data within the country’s borders, in order to meet local data residency requirements, develop applications with extremely low latency, and utilize computing, storage, networking, and artificial intelligence services at the highest level of security.

The possibility of integrating the Greek language into Amazon’s ecosystem of devices and software was also discussed, with Mr. Panay noting that the Greek alphabet will be available to users of the Kindle and Alexa platforms in the future, in a way that reflects natural language use rather than automated processing.

An overview was also conducted of Amazon’s investments in Greece, and further investment opportunities were examined, with emphasis on infrastructure for Amazon Leo satellite internet services, green energy, and the development of advanced research units.

In this context, the Prime Minister highlighted the particularly high level of the Greek workforce and Greek universities, which have contributed to the development of a dynamic startup ecosystem as well as the creation of research units in many regions of the country.