Oracle plans to launch an underground cloud region in Jerusalem in the latter half of 2021, as it races to meet growing demand for cloud services in the Middle East.
The company has entered into an agreement with Bynet Data Communications to build a data centre extending over four floors at 50 meters below ground level, at the Bynet server farm in Jerusalem. It's Oracle's first underground hyperscale data centre.
Oracle earlier this year had signalled its intention to open up an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) data centre in Israel, but the Wednesday announcement is the first time it's detailed its plans.
"Security has always been top of mind for Israel — they've been a leader in security technology and that extends to everything they do so we wanted to make sure that the products we bring to market reflect the focus on security of our products as well, so we are deep underground," said Scott Twaddle, vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Product Development at Oracle. "We want to customers to be able to trust the availability of the products that we're bringing to market."