Google LLC today said it’s adding to its cloud infrastructure with new data center facilities in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Seoul, South Korea, that will help it scale up its capacity to cater for its growing customer base.

The new cloud regions are scheduled to open in early 2020, and will each offer three Availability Zones plus access to the full gamut of Google’s cloud products and services, the company said.

The first to go online will be the South Korean facility, which will be the company’s eighth overall in the Asia Pacific region. Google said the South Korean region is necessary to support the “tremendous customer adoption” of its cloud services in that country. Its Korean customers include the likes of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and LG CNS Co. Ltd., which is a subsidiary of LG Corp. It also counts Netmarble Corp., the biggest Korean gaming company, as one of its customers, using services such as Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery and Cloud ML Engine.

The Salt Lake City region will become the company’s sixth overall in the U.S. Once again, the idea is to provide better support to local customers, including the payment processing service PayPal Inc.

“Google Cloud’s expanding infrastructure in Salt Lake City is a welcome development as our growing business continues to scale to meet the needs of over 250 million customers,” said Dan Tournian, PayPal’s vice president of employee technology and experiences and data centers. “This new region will enable enhanced availability and performance for our  customers, when every millisecond counts.”

Not only that, but the new region will enable Google’s customers in the western U.S. to split their cloud workloads over three regions, including existing facilities in Los Angeles and Oregon. That’s aimed at ensuring faster and even more reliable connectivity.

The new regions are part of a massive $47 billion infrastructure investment by Google from 2016 to 2018, said Dominic Preuss, a Google Cloud product management director. That initiative has seen Google add 15 new cloud regions to its previous four, bringing its total to 19 regions and 58 Availability Zones in 14 countries worldwide, he said.

Google had previously announced further new regions that will open in Osaka, Japan, later this year, and Jakarta, Indonesia, in early 2020. That will bring its total number of regions to 23 once they and today’s newly announced facilities go online.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Google