The World Wide Web erases distance, and the computing cloud makes location an afterthought, except, as it turns out, when distance and location still matter.

"Starting today the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) supports the ability to launch instances in multiple geographically distinct regions. The new EU region enables users to launch instances in Europe."

From the announcement:

These are three of the main drivers for the requests by our customers:

1. Lower latency from EC2 instances to their clients. The European Region can be accessed with low latency from all major European network hubs.

2. Low latency access to data stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). A large number of customers have stored data into the European Region of Amazon S3. With the new European region this data can now be accessed with low latency from within EC2 at no cost

3. Regulatory requirements may require that data be stored in the EU and/or processing take place within the EU. With the European Regions of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 developers now can address those requirements.