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Amazon Chime is a global service that operates from the Northern Virginia AWS region. This is where all user information is stored, such as chat, contacts, calendar and meeting recordings.

Amazon Chime hosts meetings in 16 AWS Regions and 32 Availability Zones.

Amazon Chime administrators can choose where meetings for their organization can be hosted by opting in or out of each AWS Region supported by Amazon Chime. Amazon Chime meetings can now be hosted in the following AWS Regions: Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Northern California, Montreal, São Paulo, Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Cape Town, and Milan.

Note

Amazon Chime customers who created accounts prior to Dec 3, 2019, need to use the Amazon Chime console to opt into the new Amazon Chime meeting regions. For more information on managing regions see the Administration Guide.

Amazon Chime will automatically select the region that provides a low latency for all meeting participants, whether they are all local in one place or distributed globally.

Meeting region selection is performed for every meeting based on participant proximity to AWS Regions and AWS network telemetry. 40 minutes before the meeting, we will look at all the registered users that are invited to the meeting, determine their nearest AWS region, and identify a supported media region (based on the host's Amazon Chime account setup which may restrict certain regions) that is in "the middle" for all registered users. 5 minutes prior to the scheduled meeting time we will check the selected region and if it is congested, recalculate to a "better" region. If someone joins the meeting early - prior to meet@chime.aws starting the meeting - we will start the meeting in the host's region.

Where a meeting is hosted is important, because every participant sends and receives their audio and video from that location. As the distance increases, the likelihood of network impairments impacting quality increases, and the mouth-to-ear latency begins to disrupt the natural conversation flow. With this global expansion of Amazon Chime, participants have a high-quality meeting experience regardless of whether they are co-located or distributed geographically.

For more information about the benefits of media regionalization, please read our blog post: What does Amazon Chime’s global expansion mean for you?