New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visits Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle – GeekWire

Amazon hosted New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Friday at its Seattle headquarters, the place she achieved with Amazon World-wide-web Solutions CEO Adam Selipsky.

As component of a U.S. tour that also provided a reception with Microsoft executives in Seattle and a visit on Tuesday with President Joe Biden, Ardern put in time inside of Amazon’s plant-filled Spheres developing and also spoke with Selipsky.

“We had a great discussion about electronic transformation, techniques improvement, sustainability, and how we are serving to organizations across Aotearoa, New Zealand scale and increase internationally,” Selipsky wrote on LinkedIn.

Amazon announced final 12 months that it would spend a lot more than $5 billion in excess of 15 many years on info facilities in New Zealand, wherever it will launch a new AWS Region. The cloud arm has been energetic in New Zealand since 2014. Its regional buyers include things like Air NZ, the New Zealand Ministry of Health and fitness, College of Auckland, and more.

Amazon’s rewarding cloud business enterprise continues to assist Amazon’s base line it reported $14.8 billion in revenue for the second quarter, up 37% year-over-12 months, and operating earnings of $4.2 billion.

Selipsky, the former Tableau CEO, returned to AWS very last calendar year as its CEO after former AWS main Andy Jassy was named to succeed Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO.

Ardern, who spoke at Harvard’s graduation on Thursday, also visited with Microsoft executives including Microsoft President Brad Smith on her pay a visit to to Seattle.

Microsoft lately declared a new partnership with the country, and is also creating knowledge centers in New Zealand.

Other tech and startup leaders from New Zealand joined Ardern on her take a look at to Seattle, together with Sam Kidd, CEO of LawVu, which just lately announced a new Seattle workplace.

“I’m enthusiastic about continuing our investment decision right here in Seattle,” Kidd wrote in a LinkedIn write-up about his time in the Emerald City. “The unapologetic mentality people today have in this article around making and increasing a company is the two exciting and refreshing. To have regional launched companies the likes of Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon and Starbucks is extraordinary. There is basically a thing in the coffee in this article.”