Oracle has announced that it plans to invest $1 billion in Spain to open up its third cloud region in the country’s capital, Madrid. It said it has done this to meet the rapidly growing demand for its AI and cloud services in the country and to help drive AI skills development across the country.
The firm has partnered with Telefonica Espana to act as its host partner for the planned cloud region. It said that once ready, customers, including those in the prominent financial services sector, will be able to migrate their mission-critical workloads from their data centres to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Oracle claims this move will also allow customers to more easily stay in line with regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the European Outsourcing Guidelines such as EBA, EIOPA, and ESMA.
Commenting on the planned investment, Jose Luis Escriva, minister for digital transformation and public administration, Government of Spain, said:
“The opening of the third Oracle cloud region in Spain is excellent news for our country. The investment announced by Oracle provides a significant boost that will help Spanish enterprises and public sector organizations innovate with AI and continue advancing on the path of digital transformation.”
Another benefit to customers moving over to OCI is that they have access to a vast array of services previously unavailable to them. Services that Oracle offers in its cloud include Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL HeatWave Database Service, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, OCI Generative AI service, and OCI AI Infrastructure.
With regards to regulations around the financial sector and how it can help, Oracle said that it has developed capabilities and practices that address the requirements for DORA and other key industry regulations.
Banco Sabadell, for example, said that it relied on Oracle to help it comply with local regulatory requirements. Its director of technology services, Enrique Rodriguez, said:
“The arrival of the third Oracle Cloud Region in Spain will open significant opportunities for us in terms of utilizing new technologies such as AI across different areas of our business.”
The investment from Oracle comes hot on the heels of Amazon’s massive €15.7 billion AWS investment in the Aragon region of Spain which aims to create 17,500 full-time-equivalent jobs in local businesses on an annual basis.
Source: Oracle