Google Cloud Platform touts reliability and redundancy as two of its main draws, and they have announced that they will be improving those facets of the service even further by opening up new regional data centers in California, the Netherlands, and Canada. The new regional data centers were announced at Google’s annual Google Cloud Next conference, which took place in San Francisco this year. Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, was the one to make the announcement, lending it that much more credence. These new data centers are targeting regions that are either outright underserved, or are overcrowded with data center requests, which means that users near those locations or whose data often crosses those locations will see some significant improvements.
Hölzle also announced that this move is just the latest in a series of capital expenditures that has, over the years, seen the search giant pay out over $30 billion, and seen their data center operations expand to about 17 zones over 50 regions. The announcement comes on the heels of an announcement last year that Google was planning a massive expansion of the regional data centers for their public Google Cloud Platform offering, which means that this move is almost certainly not the last such expansion that we will be seeing in the near future.
Recent expansions saw Google putting up new data centers in both Tokyo and Oregon, with plans to get more going in the coming months and years. Google wants to open 11 new data centers overall, of which the aforementioned two, and the three announced today, will be a part of. This means that the total number of regional data centers will jump from its current 17 up to a much healthier 26, a number that should substantially crank up performance for a large swath of Google Cloud Platform users, and improve other Google services that rely on cloud data. This includes a wider range of products than one may think; things like Google Assistant, Google Play, and Google Drive, which millions if not billions access every day, are run at least partially on Google’s remote data centers, rather than having everything run through home base in Mountain View.