Oracle to launch 14 new cloud regions, as it quadruples cloud capex

Oracle plans to open 14 new cloud regions in the coming year, including in Johannesburg, Jeruselam, Marseille, Milan, and Stockholm, as it eyes plans to get "at least" 44 cloud regions by the end of 2022.

Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain will also get new regions, the company said October 11.

The investment comes after CEO Safra Katz said on Oracle's September 2021 earnings call that total Oracle cloud revenues were now hitting a robust annualised revenue of $10 billion "with an accelerating growth rate that we expect will exit the fiscal year in the mid-20s."

Capex for its fiscal Q1, 2022 was $1.1 billion, on track to meet its target of $4 billion this financial year; double the previous year.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has seen stellar growth over the past year,” said Clay Magouyrk, EVP Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, adding: "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.

Oracle says its data centre regions are set up to be uniquely resilient, with wach region containing "at least three fault domains, which are groupings of hardware that form logical data centers for high availability and resilience to hardware and network failures. Some regions (Ashburn, Phoenix, Frankfurt, and London) provide further resilience to entire data centers through multiple availability domains (ADs), which each contain three fault domains."

Oracle's cloud expansion comes as total global IT infrastructure spending hit $307 billion  in H1, according to research by Synergy -- whose figures span capex for telcos and hyperscale operators, "mostly focused on networking and data center hardware and software."

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure currently operates 23 commercial regions and seven government regions, in addition to multiple national security regions.