Google Cloud Plans GCP Data Centers In Seoul, Salt Lake City

Google Cloud continues to build out its cloud computing network infrastructure, with plans to expand the number of its announced Google Cloud Platform regions to 23 with new data centers in Seoul, South Korea, and Salt Lake City, Utah.

The three-zone Seoul data center region will go online early next year, followed by the Salt Lake City facility, also with three availability zones, the No. 3 cloud provider announced at its Google Cloud Next ’19 summit in San Francisco today.

The infrastructure expansion largely is due to demand from public cloud customers, according to Dominic Preuss, GCP’s director of product management for storage and databases. Nineteen of Google Cloud’s announced data centers currently are operating with 58 availability zones. The company also plans to open an Osaka, Japan, data center region later this year, and another in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the first half of next year.

“Each of these regions has multiple zones, allowing customers to build highly available and distributed applications,” Preuss said. “And the way that we have been able to do this kind of remarkable outlay of new regions is because we’ve invested heavily -- to the tune of $47 billion of (capital expenditure) investment in 2016 to 2018. This really shows our commitment to meeting the needs of our customers wherever they happen to be in global markets.”

The Seoul data center – which will be Google Cloud’s eighth in the Asia Pacific region -- will serve multinational companies looking to serve their own customers in that market or local customers looking to expand globally, Preuss said. Google Cloud is targeting South Korea’s strength in the telecommunications, information technology and gaming sectors. Its customers there include LG CNS, Netmarble, Samsung and TMON. Netmarble, South Korea’s largest mobile gaming company, uses Google Cloud to support new game development, manage infrastructure and bring business intelligence to its operations with BigQuery, Cloud ML Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine, according to Google Cloud.

Google Cloud’s Salt Lake City data center will allow its customers to distribute their application workloads across three regions in the western United States for higher reliability, Preuss said, and it will enable those in the Silicon Slopes-area to easily run low-latency, hybrid cloud workloads. Google Cloud also has western U.S. centers in Los Angeles and Oregon.

With the addition of Salt Lake City – which has strong healthcare, financial services and IT industries, and is a data center infrastructure hub -- Google Cloud will have data centers in six continental U.S. regions.

It’s opened 15 new cloud data center regions with 45 zones in 13 countries in total in the last three years. Once the Jakarta, Osaka, Seoul and Salt Lake City facilities open, it will have 23 regions with 70 availability zones.

“You’re just continuing to see the tremendous investment that Google is making in not only serving the needs of Google customers, but the needs of our Google Cloud Platform customers (and allowing) them to leverage the same infrastructure that we run our Google business on,” Preuss said.

But the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Cloud trails No. 2 cloud provider Microsoft Azure and No. 1 Amazon Web Services in numbers of regions. Microsoft Azure is generally available in 44 regions around the world, with plans announced for 10 more.

AWS has 20 infrastructure regions with 61 availability zones. Last week, it announced it would open a data center region in greater Jakarta by the end of 2021 or in early 2022 – its ninth in Asia Pacific – bringing the number of its global regions that are operational or in the works to 25. It’s also working on data centers in Bahrain, Hong Kong, Cape Town, South Africa, and Milan, Italy.