Amazon Web Services Inc. is extending its global data center network to Africa.

The cloud giant today announced plans to open an AWS region in Cape Town, South Africa, by mid-2020 that will enable regional customers to run their workloads locally for the first time. In AWS parlance, a region is a set of data centers locations, or availability zones, that are physically close to one another but operate independently.

AWS said the Cape Town region will consist of three availability zones. The planned data centers mark the culmination of a gradual expansion that has seen the cloud giant slowly but surely lay the groundwork for an African infrastructure presence.

AWS officially opened an office in the South African capital of Johannesburg in 2015, several years after it first started building out local line-of-business teams. Then, in 2017, the provider brought its Direct Connect cloud networking service to the country. AWS’ most recent move was the launch of two local CloudFront content delivery nodes in May of this year.

The provider has built up a sizable client base in Africa along the way that will now have faster access to its services. Storing workloads and data in closer geographic proximity to workers enables companies to reduce latency, while simplifying the management sensitive information that needs to be kept within a firm’s home jurisdiction for legal reasons.

AWS isn’t the first major cloud provider to have set its sights on the African market. Last year, rival Microsoft Corp. announced plans to set up Azure data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg by the end of 2018. IBM Corp. opened a South African cloud facility back in 2016.

Google LLC is now the last of the industry’s four largest cloud providers that hasn’t yet announced any African expansion plans. But the company will most likely join its rivals sooner or later given how fierce the competition is in cloud computing.

AWS leads the public cloud with an estimated 34 percent market share, according to Synergy Research LLC’s most recent industry study. Microsoft and Google comfortably hold the second and third places, respectively, thanks to strong revenue growth, but Synergy noted that their gains haven’t done much to weaken AWS’ position.

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