Google Cloud Platform Region Opens In Las Vegas

The new region gives customers added capacity and the flexibility to distribute their workloads across the western United States, including its existing cloud regions in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Oregon.

Google officially opened its new cloud region in Las Vegas today, giving customers operating in the United States a fourth western U.S. region to distribute their workloads.

The new, three-zone Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region is the seventh U.S. and 23rd global cloud region for the No 3 cloud provider.

Google Cloud said it offers regional services that automatically distribute data, processing and user traffic across multiple zones in the same region and multi-regional services that automatically replicate data and processing across multiple regions.

“Like all regions, the zones in Las Vegas are connected by low latency, high-bandwidth networking, and our private backbone provides a secure connection through our global network between Las Vegas and the other 22 GCP regions globally,” Google Cloud product manager Julia Broodney said in a blog post today. “The Las Vegas region provides you with the speed and availability you need to innovate faster and build high-performing applications that cater to the needs of nearby end users. Additionally, the region gives you added capacity and the flexibility to distribute your workloads across the western U.S., including our existing cloud regions in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Oregon.”

Google Cloud revenue, which includes Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, climbed to $2.77 billion in the first quarter, a 52 percent increase from the prior-year period, parent company Alphabet announced yesterday.

CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was “recalibrating the focus and pace” of Google investments in areas such as data centers, citing the business impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

“We will be optimizing the way our data centers work and prioritizing strategic areas of investment where we need to support our users and partners,” Pichai said.

Google-accrued capital expenditures for the quarter was $5.7 billion, reflecting investments in data centers, followed by servers and office facilities, according to chief financial officer Ruth Porat.

Google expects a moderate reduction to its forecasts relative to the beginning of the year, given the impact of the coronavirus on data center construction delays, as well as the benefit of its ongoing focus on server efficiency, she said.

“Overall, we anticipate technical infrastructure investments to remain at roughly the same level as in 2019, with relatively more spent on servers than on data center construction,” she said.

Google Cloud previously announced plans to open new cloud regions in Toronto, Canada; Jakarta, Indonesia; Warsaw, Poland; Doha, Qatar; Melbourne, Australia; and Delhi, India.