> Ireland was probably chosen because of low corporate tax rates.
Perhaps you are right. It just sounds incredibly short sighted if true. That's like, to use notax's example location, locating your startup in North Dakota because the rent is cheap over there.
Amsterdam would have been a much better location with better and cheaper bandwidth from a much larger selection of providers. In addition to better infrastructure, Amsterdam has a wider and deeper talent pool for datacenter talent.
I also have a hard time really buying the tax argument as Facebook and Google have European datacenters outside Ireland and they seem to manage their Irish tax strategy just fine. Even Apple is reportedly eyeing a datacenter in the Netherlands and I doubt they would consider one if it messed with their Irish sandwitch.
> This might have been more important when the first location was chosen than it is now, and latencies in Europe are mostly pretty minimal anyway.
From experience I can tell you that there is plenty of latency to go around in Europe. Part of that is Amazon's dubious choice of location and part of it is their network. Cloudping easily gives you latencies comparable to east coast - west coast ping times when testing from various European location to AWS Ireland.
Unlike popular entertainment would have you believe, Europe in not a country and neither is it the size of a postage stamp. You'd also be advised to consider that previously Ireland was Amazon's closest location to Russia and that in itself is a pretty big country.
Amusingly enough Amazon's Irish location is almost exactly like putting your datacenter in North Dakota as notax quipped.
Sources: https://ams-ix.net/ https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/