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Google has announced a major expansion of its cloud data centres, with two new regions to start running this year and another 10 to be available by the end of 2017.

The news comes days after a note from Synergy Research which found the US remains far out in front as the number one location for data centres. Google’s two upcoming launches will include one US site, a US Western region in Oregon, with another to be built in Tokyo.

“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,” wrote Google product manager Varun Sakalkar in a company blog post. “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 [and] performance.”

It has been a busy period for Google’s cloudy operations, with recent announcements of a client win in the form of Home Depot, as well as the news that Apple would move a portion of its data to the search giant from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The majority of the reaction to the news has not surprisingly been around Google’s attempts to catch up with AWS, which turned 10 years old earlier this month and is also looking to expand its data centre operations in the UK among other locations.

Responding to Google’s expansion of its data centre footprint, John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst and research director, said: “As we have reported previously Google lags far behind AWS and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market, and at least part of that was down to having a cloud data centre network that wasn’t as extensive.

“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 added.