Google Cloud is launching a new cloud region in Spain through a partnership with Telefónica, to reduce cloud network latency to enterprises and service providers and widen its cloud offering to them.
The cloud region will be based in the Madrid region and will use three data centres controlled by Telefónica. Google recently said that it would be establishing its first direct cloud capacity in France too, during 2022.
“Telefónica's strong infrastructure combined with Google Cloud's mobile edge platform will deliver reliable and value-added 5G services to Spanish businesses and consumers,” said the international telco.
It said it would use Google Cloud services to boost its global digital capabilities, in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and application development.
José María Álvarez-Pallete, chairman and CEO of Telefónica, said: "With our alliance with Google Cloud we want to fulfil our social commitment and foster the recovery of the [Spanish] economy, helping companies, the public administration and all types of organisations not only to recover the ground lost by the Covid-19 crisis, but also to promote their digital transformation and strengthen themselves for the future."
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said: "We're partnering with Telefónica to launch a new cloud region in Spain to help businesses there – big and small - and find new ways to innovate and contribute to the country's economic recovery." The cloud region will launch with the standard set of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Cloud Storage, Spanner and BigQuery.
The exact opening date for the Google Spain cloud has so far not been confirmed. Google's France cloud region is expected to open in “early 2022”, through data centre colocation agreements in the Paris region. The company already has European cloud regions in Belgium, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.
