Google LLC Tuesday announced the opening of its sixth European cloud region, its 19th worldwide.

Located in Zurich, Switzerland, the new region consists of three availability zones, which means it’s made up of three independent data centers.

In a blog post, Google said the new region would ensure local customers have lower-latency access to its standard Google Cloud Platform offerings, which include its Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery services.

“Designed to support Swiss and European customers, the Zurich GCP region (europe-west6) comes with three availability zones, enabling high availability workloads,” said Google’s geographic extension manager Kirill Tropin.

By hosting their applications and workloads in the Zurich region, local customers should see improved latency of up to 10 milliseconds, the company said.

Tropin added that the Zurich region also features Google’s private, software-defined Cloud Interconnect network, which enables a fast and private link to other Google regions. That means customers can access Google services not presently available in the Zurich region with similar low latencies.

Google’s plans for the new Zurich region were first announced last May. The company said at the time it was also planning to open a new region in Finland, which will go online later this year.

Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., said it’s important for public cloud leaders such as Google to keep adding new regions. Companies that access Google’s offerings through a local region generally see better performance, he said. It also helps them to comply with local data privacy and residency requirements.

“The central location of Switzerland in the EU, although not being part of the EU, makes it an ideal place for both,” Mueller said. “Zurich being a major banking location does not hurt either.”

Zurich also happens to be the location of Google’s largest machine learning facility outside of the U.S., where the technologies that power its Google Assistant and Knowledge Graph were first developed.

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