Google has announced a new cloud region in Zürich, Switzerland, its sixth in Europe and 19th worldwide.

The region consists of three 'zones,' that is, three geographically independent data centers.

A big plus for Switzerland

Google announced that the cloud region has gone live today in a blog post, so regional customers will now have lower latency access to the standard Google Cloud Platform portfolio, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner and Bigquery.

Kirill Tropin, Google's geographic expansion product manager, said: “This region comes with Cloud Interconnect, our private, software-defined network that provides a fast and reliable link between each region around the world. You can use services that aren’t presently available within the Zürich region via the Google Network.”

Google announced the construction of its new Zürich cloud region in May last year, while another new region in Finland’s Osaka is scheduled to open later this year.

Zürich is also home to Google’s largest engineering office outside the US, with Google Zürich behind the engine that powers Knowledge Graph and the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant.

The European branch of Google Research focuses on machine intelligence, natural language processing and understanding, and machine perception.