Google is taking a page out of Microsoft and Amazon’s book, establishing its first African cloud infrastructure, announced during the company’s second annual Google4Africa conference yesterday. The service will begin in South Africa, with the goal to have it eventually spread across the rest of Africa.
Additionally, the search giant announced it would build a series of interconnecting sites, linked to its reasonably new Equiano broadband cable. These sites will be built in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Nairobi and Lagos. The point of these is to provide access to Google’s incoming data centre in South Africa.
The birth of jobs (not Steve)
Google’s goal is to give the country a way to help out businesses, schools, individuals and developers. Once complete, people will have easier access to information and free online tools that “…in turn, create jobs.” said Google in a statement yesterday.
“According to research by AlphaBeta Economics commissioned by Google Cloud, the South Africa cloud region will contribute more than a cumulative US$2.1-billion (R37-billion) to the country’s GDP, and will support the creation of more than 40 000 jobs by 2030.”
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Besides the fact that we know Google’s cloud-based infrastructure is coming, Google failed to offer more information. We don’t know exactly where the centre will be located, nor when the service will be open to the public. Niral Patel, Google’s Cloud leader, told TechCentral that a project like this typically takes 18-24 months from the time of announcement. The earliest we’ll be seeing any sort of availability commercially will be in April 2024.
The incoming cloud data centre will be the third in the country, unless Oracle, which also has plans to bring its own data centre to South Africa, beats Google to the punchline. As it stands, South Africans have to rely on Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services for their cloud needs.