Google LLC today announced plans to build three new international cloud regions, or data center clusters, to meet the infrastructure requirements of customers more effectively.

The new cloud regions will be launched in Chile, Germany and Saudi Arabia. The regions set to be built in Chile and Saudi Arabia will be the first for Google in the countries, while the one planned in Germany will be the search giant’s second local data center cluster. Google has an existing location in Frankfurt that it inaugurated three years ago.

A Google Cloud region is a collection of so-called zones, or data center modules that are located in close proximity to another one. Each zone usually has separate power, cooling and networking equipment to reduce the risk of a technical issue in one zone taking all the others offline. This setup allows Google to provide its cloud services with minimal downtime while giving customers the option to distribute workloads across multiple zones in a region to lower the chance of outages.

Google has been rapidly expanding its global infrastructure footprint in recent years. In the past 12 months alone, the company has launched four new regions, announced plans for several more and started work on another undersea internet cable. The Grace Hopper cable will extend from New York to the British town of Bude and Bilbao, Spain, making it one of the first new internet cables in more than 15 years that’s being built to connect the U.S. with the U.K.

Google’s growing network of overseas data centers enables the search giant to compete for international customers more effectively by offering them lower-latency access to its infrastructure. Building more regions also helps Google win additional business from its existing large enterprise customers. Big companies that have employees or customers across multiple countries often prefer to deploy workloads locally in each region to reduce latency for users.

It’s the same set of considerations that is driving the infrastructure expansion roadmaps of Google’s major cloud rivals. Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. both announced multiple new data centers in 2020, along with edge computing solutions that enable customers to deploy their services closer to their locations. 

Image: Google