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Google has unveiled a new data centre with three new zones in the US east coast region, adding South Carolina to Iowa, Belgium and Taiwan as its primary data centre locations.

The expansion move comes two weeks after Microsoft cloud platform marketing general manager Mike Schutz decried Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for having, at the time, 12 regions combined compared with Microsoft’s 19.

“This will open up our services to customers that were waiting on a US East Coast presence,” Jay Judkowitz, Google Cloud Platform senior product manager wrote in a blog post, adding: “Besides lowering latency to those on the US East Coast, the addition of the South Carolina location gives customers across North America the capability to build multi-region disaster recovery plans for their applications running on Google Cloud Platform.”

While this often comes down to a question of semantics, Google now has 13 available zones across four regions. AWS has four North American regions, with US East, in North Virginia, open since 2006, alongside four Asia Pacific regions, two European regions and one in South America. The most recent of these was the opening of the second European region, in Frankfurt.

The move correlates with a recent study put forward by Synergy Research on data centre location, which argued the US and China would remain the major hubs for data centres from the primary public cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS. “While the hyperscale cloud operators continue to invest huge amount  in their data centre footprints and to expand their geographic scope, there is no doubt that the US and China will continue to be the lead countries for locating major data centres,” said John Dinsdale, a Synergy chief analyst.

You can find out more about Google’s US East Coast data centre region here.