Just days after announcing an expansion into Canada, Amazon.com Inc. is growing its global infrastructure network once again by opening two new cloud data centers in the United Kingdom.

The facilities are located in London and are reportedly on lease from local hosting companies as opposed to being owned by the company itself. Regardless, Amazon has equipped them with the same hardware that powers the rest of its data center network. Jeff Barr, the chief evangelist for the company’s cloud division, stated that more than 40 services are available on launch along with variety of virtual machine configurations.

Amazon has also linked the facilities to Britain’s dedicated government network in a bid to court public sector clients. The company’s platform is already used by the U.K. Ministry of Justice, the The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and London’s transport oversight body among others. Added up with the private companies and developers that use its cloud, Amazon boasts more than 100,000 customers on the island.

The new London data centers will enable users from England to host their workloads locally instead of having to run them in the company’s Ireland facilities as did they until now. Besides reducing latency for these customers, the expansion should also make Amazon more competitive against the rivaling providers that have set up shop in Britain recently.

Last month, IBM Corp. revealed plans to launch four new U.K data centers including a site constructed specifically with the British public cloud sector in mind. A few weeks earlier, Microsoft Corp. inaugurated three cloud facilities of its own that will provide local infrastructure access for users of its Azure platform. Like Amazon, the software giant has already racked up a number of big-ticket customers, including the Ministry of Defence and sports car maker Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd.

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