Amazon Web Services might be the leader in the public cloud in terms of revenue, but it still trails its biggest rival Microsoft when it comes to its the physical reach of its cloud.

The location of data centers is rapidly becoming an important factor for many cloud customers who care about where their data resides, and that probably helps to explain why AWS has just embarked on a wave of new facility construction, with the latest set to go up in Canada.

AWS yesterday said it’s planning to build its new data center in Montreal, Québec, which will be its first north of the U.S. border. The announcement comes just a week after AWS said it was opening its first data centers in South Korea.

But even with these facilities online, AWS is still behind Microsoft. It currently counts 12 AWS regions, with five more being planned. That compares to 22 for Microsoft Azure, with an additional four awaiting general availability.

For its part, Microsoft said back in June 2015 it was building not one, but two data centers in Canada – in Toronto and Quebec City – with a launch date planned for this year. AWS’s chief evangelist Jeff Barr didn’t offer a launch date for Amazon’s first Canadian facilities.

Despite Amazon’s new initiatives this year, Microsoft is still constructing cloud data centers at a faster rate. For example, it announced the launch of three facilities in India, one of the most important emerging markets for cloud services, last year. In comparison, AWS said it’s planning to add cloud data centers to India sometime this year, without elaborating further.

The two firms are also looking to build new facilities in the U.K. The companies announced their plans within a week of each other in November of last year, in response to the EU’s annulment of rules that governed storage of European users’ data in data centers outside of Europe.

Update:

Amazon Web Services has contacted us to point out it defines a “region” differently from Microsoft. It says each of its regions is made up of isolated “availability zones (AZs)”, and so a better comparison would be to say it offers 32 such AZs across its 12 regions, compared to Microsoft’s 22 regions.

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