Google is continuing its Montreal expansion, by adding the city to its regional hubs for the corporate Google Cloud service.
It's the first and only location for Canadian servers, and while the major selling point from the tech giant is lowering latency for accessing files on the cloud, it is believed it will also allow clients to keep their sensitive data within Canada outside the reach of the American Patriot Act, which can access data centers within the United States.
It also offers faster speeds for those using the service, both for Montreal clients and those across Canada.
“By opening a Google Cloud Platform region in Montreal, our goal is to allow our Canadian customers to take advantage of the low latency and high performance afforded by the Google Cloud Platform,” said Google Cloud Canada Manager Jim Lambe in a recent Google blog post.
Last year, Google announced an investment of $4.5 million over the next three years for artificial intelligence research at McGill University and the Université de Montréal.