Google Cloud Announces Plans For Three New International Cloud Regions

Himanshu Khanna

3 weeks ago

After launching four new regions in 2020 in Jakarta (Indonesia), Las Vegas (U.S.), Salt Lake City (U.S.), and Seoul (South Korea), cloud giant Google has announced plans to build three new cloud regions in Chile, Germany, and Saudi Arabia. Other than this, Google has also announced four more availability zones in France, Italy, Qatar, and Spain over the past twelve months. All these moves highlight Google’s aggressive expansion plans and the ambition to overtake Microsoft Azure in terms of number of regions.

Google currently has 24 regions with 73 availability zones (excluding the ones that aren’t live yet). In comparison, Azure has 24 zones with 77 availability zones. Three years ago, Google Cloud lagged in the cloud market behind Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, with only 13 regions. Google is likely to leave Microsoft Azure behind with its announcement of 12 new regions. On the other hand, Microsoft Azure is currently working on only six new regions.

The three new regions announced by Google Cloud are expected to start working soon with three availability zones to provide low latency and offer its growing users in these zones a superior service. Of the three regions, Chile and Saudi Arabia will see the first such servers by Google Cloud and Germany will have a second one. The company bolsters a strong portfolio with 73 availability zones in 17 countries. Such initiatives are sure to provide Google a significant footprint in the cloud market and increase its share in the market.

According to Dave Stiver, Senior Product Manager of GeoExpansion at Google Cloud, “Google Cloud customers around the world, like Carrefour Spain, Lufthansa Group, Nokia, and Procter & Gamble depend on us to drive operational efficiencies, reduce IT costs, and accelerate their digital transformations in order to better serve end consumers. A growing number of Google Cloud regions puts our trusted infrastructure everywhere our customers are today and need to be tomorrow.”

Jose Antonio Santana, CIO at Carrefour Spain, said, “Our focus is on our customers. We want to meet them wherever they are. Google Cloud has given us the flexibility to adapt our infrastructure and the agility to make changes very quickly. We’ve been able to adopt and standardize industry best practices across the whole company and provide the highest possible service to our customers.”