Google builds London cloud computing data centre

Google has revealed that it has built a London cloud computing data centre. The US tech giant has built the facility to provide faster access times to nearby third party clients. It is the second such centre Google has opened in Europe, after it opened up in Brussels. The firm also has data centres across the US and in Asia, as it aims to expand its reach as a service provider.

In a recent survey, Google was ranked as the third ‘most capable’ cloud computing service provider. Amazon and Microsoft both came above Google, in the report published by Gartner. “In terms of sales to the cloud infrastructure as a service market, Google’s share was also a distant third," a Gartner spokesperson said.

In announcing the London data centre, Google also revealed plans to open facilities in Finland, the Netherlands and Frankfurt. "GCP [Google Cloud Platform] customers throughout the British Isles and Western Europe will see significant reductions in latency when they run their workloads in the London region," said product manager Dave Stiver. "In cities like London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Amsterdam, our performance testing shows 40% to 82% reductions in round-trip latency when serving customers from London compared with the Belgium region."

A spokesperson for the company added that the decision to build a London centre had been taken before the Brexit vote. They added that speculation over the UK’s data privacy laws had not been factored into the company’s decision to set up in London.

The announcement comes just days after Samsung announced that it had snubbed London for Berlin due to a high cost of living in the UK capital. Snubbing London because the British capital is ‘not a fun place to live unless you are rich’, Samsung Next Europe managing director Felix Peterson eventually settled on the German capital for the firm’s European HQ. “In Berlin, you can do stuff without much money. You can bike around or sit in the park,” he said.