Google has unveiled ambitious expansion plans for its global cloud footprint with the construction of 12 data centres and the opening of 11 new cloud regions worldwide.
Google is today the third largest cloud provider in the world behind AWS and Microsoft Azure, according to Morgan Stainley.
The data centres will see the company grow from today’s four cloud regions (Eastern US, Central US, Western Europe and East Asia) to 15, topping the 12 of Amazon AWS. In contrast, Azure has 22 regions with plans for five new ones.
The company plans to open the first two data centres in the new US Western region in Oregon and in the East Asia region in Tokyo, Japan, before the end of 2016. The Japan region will be "in beta for at least a month".
The other ten regions are expected to come online throughout 2017, Varun Sakalkar, Google Cloud’s product manager confirmed in a blog post.
All regions will have multiple availability zones to offer high-availability computing to customers in each locale.
Sakalkar said: "We are opening these new regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness.
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"With these new regions, even more applications become candidates to run on Cloud Platform, and get the benefits of Google-level scale and industry leading price/performance."
John Dinsdale, chief analyst and MD at Synergy Research Group, said that AWS does not "really need" to be concerned about Google’s data centre expansion.
He told CBR: "It is a competitive market and they have to expect other cloud providers to be pushing hard. In one sense having a few huge providers all pushing hard helps to stimulate the overall market which is good for everyone.
"AWS has been incredibly successful at driving the market and maintaining a grip on market share leadership. Microsoft and IBM have been on a charge too."
He said that Google has been growing quickly but from a very small base, so it remains quite a way behind the other three.
"Clearly Google has decided that it wants to change that picture," Dinsdale said.
In January,speculation emerged that Google could possibly convert 70 edge points-of-prencese (PoP) in 33 countries to 70 edge data centres to make its services faster giving the company one of the widest data centre networks in the market.
