To fulfill the fast expanding demand for its AI and cloud services in Spain, Oracle has announced plans to invest more than $1 billion to establish a third cloud region in Madrid and accelerate AI skill development throughout the country.

The new public cloud region will allow Oracle customers and partners in all industries in Spain, including the country’s prominent financial services sector, to migrate mission-critical workloads from their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) while complying with regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the European Outsourcing Guidelines (EBA, EIOPA, and ESMA). Telefónica España will host the projected cloud region.

The planned cloud region in Madrid will assist public and private sector enterprises in moving all types of workloads to the cloud, modernizing their applications, and innovating with data, analytics, and AI. Oracle is the only hyperscaler capable of offering AI and a full suite of 100+ cloud services in dedicated, public, and hybrid cloud environments around the world. This comprises the Oracle Autonomous Database, MySQL HeatWave Database Service, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, OCI Generative AI service, and OCI AI Infrastructure.

“The opening of the third Oracle cloud region in Spain is excellent news for our country,” said José Luis Escrivá, minister for digital transformation and public administration, Government of Spain. “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.”

“It is great news that major technology multinationals such as Oracle are announcing this level of investment in the Region of Madrid,” said Miguel López-Valverde, councillor for digitalisation, Government of the Region of Madrid. “We are convinced of the importance of public-private collaboration in this area, and of facilitating the development of cloud infrastructure in our region. Over the next three years, the region of Madrid is expected to receive investments of more than six billion Euros from the cloud industry, which is critical to helping us build a digital economy capable of creating high-quality jobs, attracting investment, and retaining talent.”

Oracle also provides a distinct EU Sovereign Cloud, with one region in Madrid, to assist public and commercial sector customers in migrating sensitive, regulated, or strategic regional data and applications to the cloud. The Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud in Madrid is run by EU-based people and supports workloads that adhere to EU sovereignty and data protection laws.

“Spanish enterprises and public sector organizations are rapidly embracing the cloud to gain access to the latest digital technologies such as AI, and the upcoming public cloud in Madrid will help them address data residency requirements as well as regulations in key sectors such as financial services,” said Albert Triola, country leader, Oracle Spain. “With our plans to invest an additional $1B in Spain over the next 10 years, we are reaffirming our commitment to helping Spanish organizations of all sizes and industries – including those across Spain’s small and medium-sized enterprises and the financial services industry – accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies to boost business performance and resilience.”

OCI offers customers and partners a resilient and scalable cloud foundation.

Customers and partners will benefit from extra low-latency access to cloud services as the impending new region joins the existing Oracle Cloud Region in Madrid, allowing them to get more value out of their data. Customers can also use high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to improve business continuity and help meet data residency regulations and requirements in Spain and the EU, as well as industry-specific requirements and regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the financial services industry.

Financial services organizations face unique regulatory requirements due to the inherent sensitivity of their workloads, and Oracle has developed capabilities and practices to assist customers in the financial services sector in meeting DORA and other key industry regulations. As part of its ongoing efforts to assist financial services customers with their due diligence, Oracle created the Advisory: Oracle Cloud Services and the European Outsourcing Guidelines (EBA, EIOPA, ESMA) to allow customers to analyze OCI in light of their regulatory outsourcing recommendations. In addition, Oracle Cloud Regions, which include the existing and forthcoming regions in Madrid, as well as the EU Sovereign Cloud Region in Madrid, provide backup and disaster recovery solutions to assist customers meet their data availability and resilience requirements.

Furthermore, OCI’s sovereign AI capabilities give customers more control over where and how their data and computing resources are stored and managed. As a result, clients can achieve AI sovereignty by ensuring that their AI use is consistent with data governance rules.

Oracle’s unique cloud architecture enables it to create dedicated cloud regions with hyperscale cloud services within customer data centers while also deploying more public cloud regions faster by starting with an ideal footprint and growing as needed. This method helps satisfy the needs of all nations and regions without sacrificing cloud capabilities, while still delivering the consistent performance, SLAs, and worldwide pricing for which OCI is known.

Leading organizations in Spain welcome the upcoming Public Cloud Region.

“Our partnership with Oracle has been paying off for decades. We have a stronger position in the market, combining the best capabilities of both companies,” said Sergio Sánchez, operations, network and IT director, Telefónica España. “On the one hand, we continue to migrate part of our mission-critical infrastructure to Oracle’s cloud to be more agile in delivering innovative products and services to our customers around the world. On the other hand, this is the third cloud region for which we have been trusted as a host partner, again positioning us as a leader in the data center industry.”

“We rely on Oracle to migrate our critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure while complying with local regulatory requirements. OCI provides us with a robust and secure cloud infrastructure,” said Enríque Rodríguez, director of technology services, Banco Sabadell. “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.”

“Naturgy is migrating a large part of its critical data infrastructure to OCI, which we selected for its scalability, performance, and price competitiveness,” said Rafael Blesa, general manager of information systems, Naturgy. “The upcoming arrival of Oracle’s third cloud region in Spain is great news as it will allow us to migrate low-latency and critical infrastructure support systems to the cloud while improving their security and resilience.”

“The world’s digital transformation is now unstoppable, and organizations everywhere need to adapt to remain relevant and competitive,” said Ravin Dhalani, CIO, MASORANGE. “Cloud technologies play a critical role in the telecommunications industry, enabling vendors to meet demand for high-speed services while enhancing operational efficiency and productivity. We are excited about Oracle’s upcoming third cloud region in Spain, which will help us advance our innovation on OCI.”

About Oracle Distributed Cloud

Oracle’s distributed cloud provides cloud benefits while allowing you greater control and flexibility. Oracle’s distributed cloud offerings include:

• Hyperscale public cloud regions support all sizes of organizations, including those that require rigorous EU sovereignty controls. View the whole list of regions here.
• Dedicated cloud: With OCI Dedicated Region, customers can host all OCI cloud services in their own data centers, while Oracle Alloy allows partners to resell OCI cloud services and tailor the experience. Oracle also maintains distinct Government Clouds in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, as well as Isolated Cloud Regions for US national security needs. Each of these offerings includes a complete cloud and AI stack that customers may use as a Sovereign Cloud.
• Hybrid cloud: OCI provides major cloud services on-premises through Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and Compute Cloud@Customer, with deployments in more than 60 countries.
• Multicloud: Oracle Database@Azure, MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Microsoft Azure, Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud enable customers to combine important features from several clouds.