Google Cloud has announced its latest infrastructure expansion plans, opening five new regions this year and commissioning three subsea cables in 2019.
The first quarter of this year will see data centre facilities opened in the Netherlands and Montreal, with Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong to follow, while the cables will cover four continents respectively.
The first cable, Curie, will make Google the first major non-telecom company – in their words – to build a private intercontinental cable, connecting Chile and Los Angeles. Havftue will be a project alongside Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure to connect the US to Denmark and Ireland, while HK-G will be a collaboration with RTI-C and NEC, focusing on Hong Kong and Guam alongside other major hubs in Asia.
The plans will put the total number of subsea cables at 11 – four are currently operational with four more in the works – and cloud data centre regions at 53 on 18 locations across five continents.
Writing in a blog post confirming the news, Google Cloud VP Ben Treynor explained: “Simply put, it wouldn’t be possible to deliver products like Machine Learning Engine, Spanner, BigQuery, and other Google Cloud Platform and G Suite services at the quality of service users expect without the Google network. Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers are able to make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services.
“While we haven’t hastened the speed of light, we have built a superior cloud network as a result of the well-provisioned direct paths between our cloud and end-users,” Treynor added.
While the new investments are certainly good news to those involved – Chile will see its first subsea cable land in the better part of two decades – the one continent Google’s cloud misses is Africa. AWS fares no better with Microsoft – announcing data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg in May – the only of the big three cloud providers with a presence on the world’s second most-populous continent.
You can read the full blog post here.