Amazon Web Services (AWS) has selected Digital Realty’s Athens data center campus as the newest location for AWS Direct Connect, marking a significant step in enhancing cloud access in Southeast Europe. The addition of the on-ramp at Digital Realty’s ATH3 facility enables enterprises in the region to establish low-latency, secure, and private connections to AWS’s Mediterranean Region, bypassing the public internet entirely.
Digital Realty, a global provider of carrier-neutral data centers and interconnection solutions, is expanding its AWS connectivity footprint as demand grows for hybrid IT architectures. The Athens deployment joins 17 other AWS Direct Connect locations on Digital Realty’s PlatformDIGITAL, including major global cities such as Frankfurt, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Seoul, Seattle, and Cape Town. The service allows Digital Realty customers to create private network connections between their infrastructure and AWS environments either through dedicated or hosted connections, offering options from 50 Mbps to 100 Gbps.
This latest deployment underscores Greece’s growing importance as a digital infrastructure hub for Southeast Europe. As more global and regional firms look to modernize their IT environments, access to cloud-native services like AWS through low-latency, high-throughput connectivity becomes essential. AWS Direct Connect helps organizations optimize their hybrid workloads by allowing faster and more predictable data transfers with enhanced security and performance.
Digital Realty customers in Athens can now integrate AWS services directly into their architecture using a single cross-connect. The physical proximity between the customer’s infrastructure and AWS resources helps to minimize network variability, mitigate latency spikes, and avoid the congestion typical of internet-based routes. Data exchanged via Direct Connect travels exclusively through AWS’s global network, ensuring a more consistent user experience.
According to Digital Realty, this move is aligned with the broader trend of enterprises transitioning toward hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. The company’s proprietary ServiceFabric® platform extends these benefits even further by enabling virtual interconnection to all AWS Direct Connect locations globally. That means clients in Athens can also reach additional AWS regions through Digital Realty’s orchestration layer, which spans nearly 135 data center locations worldwide.
AI, Cloud, Network Infrastructure
The development also reflects the Greek government’s broader push for digital transformation. With increasing investment in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and network infrastructure, Greece is working to establish itself as a leading digital hub in the region. Government initiatives and regulatory support have been instrumental in attracting global technology players and infrastructure investments.
Alexandros Bechrakis, Managing Director of Digital Realty in Greece, emphasized the strategic value of this development. “As Greece continues its digital evolution, the AWS Direct Connect launch in Athens reinforces our role as a regional connectivity hub. We’re providing enterprises with direct access to global cloud providers and helping them modernize their IT infrastructure to unlock new business opportunities.”
Doug Lane, Director of AWS Direct Connect, highlighted the technical and operational benefits. “With AWS Direct Connect, customers can transfer data into and out of AWS securely and reliably from their on-premise environments. These private connections offer lower costs, better performance, and higher reliability compared to public internet connections.”
Athens is now a more powerful node in the global cloud ecosystem for data center operators and cloud service providers. It is anticipated that investments such as these will be crucial to the ongoing upgrading of IT infrastructure across the Mediterranean and Europe as businesses look for more reliable, high-performance cloud access.
