Google Officially Launches Its First African Cloud 'region'

Although the data centre "region" was already launched more than a year ago, Google on Wednesday held an industry event in Johannesburg to showcase the investment to customers and partners.

The event came two weeks after Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith shared a stage with President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg to announce that the software giant would invest a further R5.4-billion in new data centre infrastructure in the country, including facilities for cloud-based artificial intelligence applications.

Microsoft said it has already spent R20.4-billion on its Azure data centres in South Africa - excluding its latest investment commitment. Amazon has also spent billions of rand on building data centres in Cape Town to service AWS customers in the region.