Software-giant Oracle Corporation plans to open 20 new data centers by 2021, its cloud chief Don Johnson told Reuters. The new data centers will more than double the size of its current data center network of 16.
Johnson said that the planned data centers will be built in Chile, Japan, South Africa and United Arab Emirates as well as other, unspecified locations in Asia and Europe. The extra infrastructure should enable Oracle to compete better for customers in those regions, particularly when it comes to government buyers.
Oracle will hire nearly 2,000 employees to support the planned expansion. The new jobs will be created at its existing Seattle, Bay Area and India software development centers, plus near the planned data centers.
Oracle’s investments in data centers and personnel should make it more competitive against the infrastructure-as-a-service market’s biggest players. The top five providers globally, led by Amazon Web Services Inc., controlled nearly 77% of the IaaS market in 2018, according to Gartner Inc. research.