U.S. tech giant Google is on track to open a cloud region in Seoul, South Korea, early next year, to better serve customer needs and provide innovative and efficient solutions.

In a media briefing on Thursday, Lee Ji-young, head of Google Cloud Korea, said that customers in Korea will be offered innovative solutions in their businesses through Google cloud services from early next year.

Google is a late joiner to the burgeoning Korean cloud market but it has been providing the most adequate solutions to customers based on proven technology as owner of 8 services including G-mail with over 1 billion monthly users, she said.

Lee’s comments come after Google announced last month during its annual Cloud Next conference in San Francisco that it will operate a new cloud region in Korea by early 2020.

Google operates data centers in major cities and countries where it provides cloud services and categorizes them as “regions.” Seoul is Google’s 8th region in the Asia Pacific region that also includes other locations like Mumbai in India, Singapore, Taiwan, and Tokyo.

Yang Seung-do, head of customer engineering at Google Cloud, also said that although most of the global information technology service is focused on the U.S. or Europe, there is also a great need for cloud services in the Asia Pacific region known for its gaming industry and startups. The company will provide complete support so that customers are able to efficiently use cloud services through its private network at fast speed, he said.

The media briefing was also attended by officials from Google Cloud customers including Samsung Electronics Co. and Netmarble Corp. Samsung Electronics uses Google’s cloud service to support its artificial intelligence assistant Bixby 2.0 in its flagship Galaxy smartphones and Netmarble in its global game service.

By Oh Dae-seok and Lee Eun-joo

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