Oracle to invest $8 billion in Japan through 2034

Oracle is planning to invest $8 billion in Japan over the next 10 years in order to expand its cloud infrastructure footprint, which in turn will help the company meet the growing demand for AI-based workloads, the company announced on Wednesday.

As part of the investment, the company said it will increase local customer support of its public cloud regions in Tokyo and Osaka.

Additionally, the public cloud service provider will also expand its local operations teams for Oracle Alloy and its OCI Dedicated Region offerings.

The increase in employee strength will enable governments and businesses across Japan to continue to move their mission-critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud and embrace sovereign AI solutions, the company said in a statement.

Oracle has been on a cloud footprint expansion spree over the last year as part of its strategy to compete with larger rivals, such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

Last year in December, the company opened its second Chile region. In September, Oracle launched a second Mexico region.

In June, the company launched two new EU Sovereign Cloud regions — Madrid and Frankfurt — to help EU enterprises comply with data regulations. Prior to that in May, Oracle became the first hyperscaler to open a cloud region in Serbia.

In 2022, during an earnings call, CEO Safra Catz said the company would invest $2.4 billion quarterly in cloud infrastructure.

Rival cloud service providers, such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google, also have a sizeable presence in Japan with each of these providers having cloud regions in Tokyo and Osaka. AWS’ cloud region in Tokyo has four Availability Zones and the Osaka region has three Availability Zones. AWS regions are composed of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations.