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

Amazon hosted New Zealand Key Minister Jacinda Ardern on Friday at its Seattle headquarters, the place she fulfilled with Amazon Website Providers CEO Adam Selipsky.

As component of a U.S. tour that also integrated a reception with Microsoft executives in Seattle and a check out on Tuesday with President Joe Biden, Ardern used time inside Amazon’s plant-crammed Spheres building and also spoke with Selipsky.

“We had a great dialogue about electronic transformation, abilities advancement, sustainability, and how we are aiding corporations across Aotearoa, New Zealand scale and develop internationally,” Selipsky wrote on LinkedIn.

Amazon announced past 12 months that it would expend more than $5 billion in excess of 15 years on information centers in New Zealand, the place it will launch a new AWS Location. The cloud arm has been active in New Zealand considering that 2014. Its area shoppers include Air NZ, the New Zealand Ministry of Wellbeing, University of Auckland, and far more.

Amazon’s financially rewarding cloud business enterprise proceeds to support Amazon’s bottom line it reported $14.8 billion in earnings for the 2nd quarter, up 37% yr-around-year, and operating cash flow of $4.2 billion.

Selipsky, the previous Tableau CEO, returned to AWS past year as its CEO after former AWS main Andy Jassy was named to do well 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 take a look at to Seattle.

Microsoft just lately declared a new partnership with the country, and is also building details centers in New Zealand.

Other tech and startup leaders from New Zealand joined Ardern on her go to to Seattle, like Sam Kidd, CEO of LawVu, which just lately declared a new Seattle office.

“I’m thrilled about continuing our expenditure here in Seattle,” Kidd wrote in a LinkedIn submit about his time in the Emerald City. “The unapologetic attitude folks have here close to making and developing a business is the two interesting and refreshing. To have community founded organizations the likes of Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon and Starbucks is amazing. There is literally some thing in the espresso in this article.”