Oracle commits to growing global datacentre footprint by opening 14 new regions over coming year

Oracle has set its sights on having 44 datacentre cloud regions up and running across the world by the end of 2022, with the database giant on course to open 14 across Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America over the coming 12 months.

Within Europe, the firm plans to stand up new regions in Italy, Sweden, France and Spain as part of its ongoing cloud expansion plans, which saw it publicly commit in 2019 to opening one new datacentre region every 23 days.

The company said it also plans to have at least two cloud regions in almost every country where it operates, with the UK among the list of places where Oracle has already met this target.

Clay Magouyrk, executive vice-president of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) unit, said the firm’s datacentre buildout plans are indicative of the rising demand it is seeing from enterprises for cloud-based services.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has seen stellar growth over the past year,” he said. “We’ve introduced several hundred new cloud services and features and are continuing to see organisations from around the world increasingly turn to OCI to run their most mission-critical workloads in the cloud. 

“With the additional cloud regions, even more organisations will be able to use our cloud services to support their growth and overall success.”

As is the case with most of the hyperscale cloud giants, Oracle has vowed to ensure the growth of its datacentre footprint does not come at the expense of the environment by pledging to have all its server farms powered by renewable energy by 2025.

The cloud infrastructure market as a whole is experiencing huge amounts of growth at the moment, with many of its major players attributing this trend to Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic prompting enterprises in almost every industry to pick up the pace of their off-premise migrations.

To this point, market tracking data published by Synergy Research Group in April 2021 revealed that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services is now in excess of $39bn globally as organisations look to shutter their datacentres and move more of their workloads to the cloud.

In terms of how it is trying to tap into that trend, Oracle is pursuing a growth strategy that is focused on “meeting customers where they are” by enabling them to deploy its cloud services within their own datacentres or in edge locations, as well as from their own public cloud server farms.