Amazon Unveils New Physical Data Transfer Terminal For U.S. Users

Amazon announced yesterday a new physical Amazon Web Services (AWS) Data Transfer Terminal for its customers to upload data to the cloud quickly and safely.

According to the company’s official announcement, the new locations in New York and Los Angeles will allow customers to bring their own storage devices and pay to transfer data at a fast speed. The company expects to open new locations in the near future.

“You can reserve a time slot to visit your nearest location and upload data rapidly and securely to any AWS public endpoints, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), or others, using a high throughput connection,” explained Channy Yun, a Principal Developer Advocate for AWS cloud, in the document.

The company explained that there can be multiple purposes for this service, from uploading large datasets for machine learning model training to transferring large files from content creators for processing.

Users can make a reservation—for a user or a team—through the AWS Management Console and pay for the space at an hourly rate. On the day of the reservation, the building staff will escort visitors to the room where the Data Transfer Terminal is located.

According to TechCrunch, this unusual service is special as it offers upload speeds of up to 400Gbps through a safe “high throughput” connection. The rate for U.S. transfers per port is $300 for a U.S.-based AWS data center and for uploads to the European region from the U.S., the rate is $500.

AWS also recently announced free computing power to researchers, allowing them to access its cloud data centers.