Amazon expands secret cloud to advance AI and strengthen US national security

Building on its legacy of supporting sensitive government workloads, AWS became the first cloud provider to cover all classification levels and has since secured major contracts including the CIA’s C2S in 2013 and the C2E in 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the upcoming launch of its new Secret-West Region, a dedicated cloud infrastructure designed to support US federal agencies operating at the secret classified level. The new region is set to be operational by the end of the year and will significantly enhance the government’s cloud capabilities for national security and artificial intelligence (AI) development.

The announcement was made by Dave Levy, AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector, during the AWS Public Sector Summit on June 10. He emphasized that the expansion would allow federal agencies to deploy mission-critical IT workloads across multiple regions, thereby improving operational resilience, speed, and security.

“The AWS Secret-West Region will strengthen U.S. AI leadership and accelerate innovation for national security missions,” Levy said. “Agencies will benefit from AWS’s advanced cloud technologies, enhancing mission execution with the speed, scalability, and security our platform offers.”

This move builds on AWS’s history of serving highly sensitive government workloads. In 2017, the company introduced its first Secret Region, becoming the first cloud provider to support all classification levels—from unclassified to top secret. It followed up with the launch of its Top Secret-West Region in 2021. AWS was also awarded the CIA’s $600 million Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract in 2013 and later secured a spot on the multi-billion dollar Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) initiative in 2020.

Enabling secure AI for intelligence

Security remains a core pillar of AWS’s government offerings. Levy reaffirmed that customers retain full control over their applications and data, underscoring AWS’s end-to-end security model—from hardware to application layer.

Joining Levy on stage, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard welcomed the new region, noting that it would help intelligence professionals harness AI within secure cloud environments. “Making AI applications accessible in classified clouds has been a game-changer,” she said.

Gabbard highlighted the need for collaboration between public agencies and private sector innovators like AWS to ensure intelligence teams have access to the best tools available. “Our mission is to identify and mitigate the greatest threats to national security. To do that, we need to focus our human resources on what only they can do, while technology handles the rest,” she added.

The Secret-West Region signals AWS’s continued commitment to enabling secure, scalable, and innovative cloud solutions for the federal government, positioning the U.S. intelligence community to better adapt to evolving global threats.

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