Okay Google, rustle me up a Lone Star State virtual machine.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) roped the Lone Star State into its cloud empire this week with the launch of its Dallas, Texas region.
The $600 million datacenter campus, which broke ground in 2019, is located approximately 25 miles south of the Dallas metro. The site, Google’s 11th in the US and 34th globally, is the latest in an ongoing effort to expand the cloud provider’s reach to new markets.
“We’ve heard from many of you that the availability of your workloads and business continuity are increasingly top priorities," Stacy Trackey Meagher managing director for Google’s central region, said in a statement. “The Dallas region gives you added capacity and the flexibility to distribute your workloads across the US.”
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The facility is GCP’s first new region in the central US since opening its Council Bluffs, Iowa location 15 years ago. The majority of Google’s datacenters since have been localized to the coasts. The Dallas site comes online less than three months after Google greenlit another region outside of Columbus, Ohio.
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“These new US regions will bring our services even closer to existing customers,” Sachin Gupta, VP and GM of infrastructure at GCP, wrote in a statement.
Google’s expansion marks the latest land grab in an effort to compete with its larger rivals Amazon and Microsoft. In 2021, the cloud provider opened five regions in Warsaw, Poland; Delhi, India; Melbourne, Australia; Toronto, Canada; and Santiago, Chile.
The Ohio and Texas sites won’t be Google's last. In December, the cloud provider shared details on three more regions in Tel Aviv, Israel; Berlin, Germany; and Dammam, Saudi Arabia, slated to come online later this year.
Google isn’t the only cloud provider looking to expand its datacenter footprint. Earlier, Alibaba Cloud opened two datacenters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as part of a joint venture with the Saudi Telecom Company called the Saudi Cloud Computing Company. And earlier this year, the Chinese cloud provider opened a site in Frankfurt, Germany.
Meanwhile, last month, it was revealed that Amazon would spend nearly $12 billion to construct five datacenters in Morrow County, Oregon, about 150 miles east of Portland. If approved, the datacenters would break ground early next year, with the first expected to come online in late 2023 and the last scheduled for early 2027.
Finally, Microsoft Azure added new regions in North China and Switzerland this spring. ®