Google is planning a massive expansion of its data centre empire
The Mountain View company announced in a blog post on Tuesday that it is expanding the Google Cloud Platform to 12 more regions between now and the end of 2017. In order to do that, it must open new data centres in each of the regions it wants to move into.
The first of the new Google data centres will be opened in Oregon, America, and Tokyo, Japan. They will be up and running by the end of 2016, while the remaining 10 will go live by the end of 2017.
Google's data centres contain servers that support Google products like Gmail, Search, Maps, and other Google Cloud Platform services.
"We're opening these new regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness," said Varun Sakalkar, Google Cloud's product manager.
"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."
Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, and Microsoft have been in a tense cloud war over the last few years, with AWS significantly undercutting the others on price. According to analysts at Synergy Research Group, AWS holds 31% market share, Microsoft 9%, IBM 7%, and Google 4%.
The new Google data centres will see Google's cloud empire grow from four cloud regions (Eastern US, Central US, Western Europe and East Asia) to 15. By contrast, AWS has 12 and Microsoft has 22 (with plans for five more).
John Dinsdale, a data centre analyst at Synergy Research Group, told TechWeekEurope that Google "lags far behind" AWS and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market. He said this is partly down to the fact that Google's data centre network hasn't been extensive enough to compete.
"Google is now on a drive to help fix that - in addition to increasing its corporate focus on the cloud market. This was long overdue," he said.