It seems a bit nit-picky, but AWS has ~18 commercial regions, but far more datacenters. It's availability zone that's a data center (more or less), not a region. So for each region you end up with 3 to 5 data centers or something like that.
For the record according to this link, https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ AWS operates in 18 geographies (called) regions... These are not data centers. There are 55 availability zones (AZs) at AWS regions, and each AZ has at least 1 data center..12 more AZs at 4 more regions are also announced
I have a suspicion that AWS uses some regions as canaries. Because we control both ends of things, I have personally noted that certain AWS functions clearly break in Australia first.
Keep in mind that even if your data is in one AWS region, it'll still be stored in multiple different datacenters some distance apart. Just not on the other side of the US.
AWS had two regions in 2008 [1]. That was 7 years ago, and I think you would agree that running a distributed object storage system across an ocean is a whole different beast than ensuring individual connectivity to servers in 2016.
I second that, as do many others on AWS forums (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=271852). Other comment in this discussion is that this new Sao Paulo region is more expensive than the rest of them - I guess it would be the same (probably even more expensive) for Australia. However I'm sure that many AWS customers would be more than happy to pay for it. Without it, CloudFront is not truly global.
AWS has a data center region in Sydney, AUS
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