Oracle has announced plans to launch 14 new cloud regions over the next year to support demand for its customers worldwide.

The company plans to open new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions in Milan (Italy), Stockholm (Sweden), Marseille (France), Spain, Singapore, Johannesburg (South Africa), Jerusalem (Israel), Mexico, and Colombia.

Oracle will also open second regions in Abu Dhabi (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Chile. By the end of 2022, the company plans to take its number of cloud regions from 30 to at least 44.

The company also said that it plans to establish at least two cloud regions in almost every country where it operates, to help customers build business continuity and disaster protection while helping them address their in-country data residence requirements. The US, Canada, UK, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, India, and Australia already have two cloud regions.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has seen stellar growth over the past year,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“We’ve introduced several hundred new cloud services and features and are continuing to see organisations from around the world increasingly turn to OCI to run their most mission-critical workloads in the cloud. With the additional Cloud regions, even more organisations will be able to use our cloud services to support their growth and overall success.”

Oracle currently provides cloud services across 30 commercial and government cloud regions in 14 countries on five continents. OCI operates 23 commercial regions and seven government regions too.

In September, AWS revealed plans to open a new data centre region in New Zealand by 2024, investing around £3.9 billion over the next 15 years and creating 1,000 jobs. The company said its new Asia Pacific region would help more of its customers run their applications by serving end users locally, provide lower latency and ensure customers can choose to securely store their data in the country.