Google Plots 5 New Regions And 3 New Subsea Cables To Boost GCP

Google is investing $30 billion in three new subsea cables and five new regions as it looks to boost the spread and reliability of its cloud services.

The new regions, located in the Netherlands, Montreal, Los Angeles, Finland and Hong Kong, will go live from 2018 and will bring the total number to 18.

The Havfrue cable will link the US with Denmark and Ireland, while the Hong Kong Guam cable system (HK-G) will provide better connections between hubs in Asia and open new routes to Australia. Both are consortium cables, whereas Curie is Google’s private cable linking Los Angeles and Chile.

Google Cloud infrastructure

It is the first subsea cable to land in Chile for two decades and will help provide services for Google’s customers in Latin America.

“The Google network has over 100 points of presence and over 7,500 edge caching nodes,” declared Ben Treynor, 24×7 VP at Google Cloud. “This investment means faster and more reliable connectivity for all our users.

“Simply put, it wouldn’t be possible to deliver products like Machine Learning Engine, Spanner, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform and G Suite services at the quality of service users expect without the Google network. Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers are able to make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services.

“While we haven’t hastened the speed of light, we have built a superior cloud network as a result of the well-provisioned direct paths between our cloud and end-users.”

Google has launched several new regions in recent months as it seeks to keep pace with public cloud rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.

This has included London, where a new region opened in June, as well as other locations in Europe including Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.

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