Amazon is opening cloud regions in Southeast Asia because customers want their data stored securely in their own countries, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels said in an exclusive interview.

“The reason for this is that many of our customers have been asking for that. They really wanted something local such that they can meet, for example, local data storage requirements, or protection of personal identifiable information,” Vogels told CNBC’s JP Ong.

Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, was the world’s largest cloud service provider in the fourth quarter, accounting for 31% of total cloud spending, according to a Feb. 26 report from Canalys.

An AWS region is a physical location where data centers are clustered. Within each AWS region are a minimum of three separate availability zones. Each zone has its own power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.

“And it’s not just startups that are looking for that. Big enterprises and government agencies as well. You can imagine government agencies want to go through a digital transformation as well,” Vogels said.

“And for them, it’s important to have these kinds of technologies on the ground, in [the] country to make sure that they can serve their customers best or their citizens best,” said Vogels.

Amazon in November said it is launching a new AWS Region in Malaysia this year. It previously committed a 25.5 billion Malaysian ringgit ($6 billion) investment by 2037 to support the government’s ambitions to transform Malaysia into a “high-income” digital economy by 2030.

“This new AWS Region will also enable customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Malaysia, help customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia,” the statement said.

This comes after AWS opened a cloud region in Indonesia in December 2021 and in Singapore in 2010. AWS is also planning to launch an infrastructure region in Thailand.

AWS already operates multiple regions across North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa and the Middle East.

“And especially, of course, the security capabilities that AWS has, that allows us to protect these customers. Security, will be, and is forever, our number one priority. [It] is our number one investment area,” said Vogels.

“And to be able to keep customers safe in our compute regions, [it] is of great attraction to companies here in the region and also governments.”

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health-care epicenter.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a “huge campus” to Nashville, “which will ultimately be our world headquarters.” He said Nashville is an established health center and a “fabulous place to live,” one that Oracle employees are excited about.

“It’s the center of the industry we’re most concerned about, which is the health-care industry,” Ellison said.

The announcement was seemingly spur-of-the-moment. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Ellison told Frist, a longtime health-care industry veteran who represented Tennessee in the Senate. The pair spoke during a fireside chat at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville.

Shares of Oracle were mostly flat in extended trading Tuesday.

Oracle moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, in 2020. The company has been making a major push into health care in recent years, most notably with its $28 billion acquisition of the medical records software giant Cerner. Ellison said Tuesday that Oracle is relatively new to the health-care sector, but he believes the company has a “moral obligation” to solve problems facing the industry.

Nashville has been a major player in the health-care scene for decades, and the city is now home to a vibrant network of health systems, startups and investment firms. The city’s reputation as a health-care hub was catalyzed when HCA Healthcare, one of the first for-profit hospital companies in the U.S., was founded there in 1968.

HCA helped attract troves of health-care professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. Oracle has been developing its new $1.2 billion campus in the city for about three years, according to The Tennessean. 

“Our people love it here, and we think it’s the center of our future,” Ellison said.

Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

HashiCorp shares jumped almost 20% on Tuesday following a media report claiming IBM was in talks to acquire the cloud software maker.

Developers use HashiCorp’s software to set up and manage infrastructure in public clouds that companies such as Amazon and Microsoft operate. Organizations also pay HashiCorp for managing security credentials.

Citing unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could materialize in the next few days.

HashiCorp and IBM representatives both told CNBC they do not comment on market rumors or speculation.

Founded in 2012, HashiCorp went public on Nasdaq in 2021. The company generated a net loss of nearly $191 million on $583 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, according to its annual report. In December, Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, whose family name is reflected in the company name, announced that he was leaving.

Revenue jumped almost 23% during that period, compared with 2% for IBM in 2023. IBM executives pointed to a difficult economic climate during a conference call with analysts in January. The hardware, software and consulting provider reports earnings on Wednesday.

Cisco held $9 million in HashiCorp shares at the end of March, according to a regulatory filing. Cisco held early acquisition talks with HashiCorp, according to a 2019 report.

IBM shares slipped after publication of the Wall Street Journal article but quickly recovered, ending Tursday’s trading session flat.

Read the full Wall Street Journal report here.