To meet the rapidly growing demand for its AI and cloud services in Spain, Oracle (NYSE:) today announced plans to invest more than US $1 billion to open a third cloud region in Madrid and drive AI skills development across the country. The new public cloud region will enable Oracle customers and partners across all industries in Spain, including its prominent financial services sector, to migrate mission-critical workloads from their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) while helping them address regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the European Outsourcing Guidelines (EBA, EIOPA, ESMA). Telefonica España will be the host partner for the planned cloud region.
The upcoming cloud region in Madrid will help public and private sector organizations migrate all types of workloads to the cloud, modernize their applications, and innovate with data, analytics, and AI. Oracle is the only hyperscaler capable of delivering AI and a full suite of 100+ cloud services across dedicated, public, and hybrid cloud environments, anywhere in the world. This includes 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 offers a separate EU Sovereign Cloud with one region in Madrid to help public and private sector customers with data and applications that are sensitive, regulated, or of strategic regional importance, move to the cloud. The Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud in Madrid is operated by EU-based personnel and supports workloads that fall under EU guidelines and requirements for sovereignty and data privacy.
"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 Provides Customers and Partners with a Resilient and Scalable Cloud Foundation
With the upcoming new region adding to the existing Oracle Cloud Region in Madrid, customers and partners can gain additional low-latency access to cloud services to help them derive better value from their data. Customers can also leverage high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to enhance business continuity and help address Spain's and the EU's regulations and requirements for data residency, in addition to industry-specific requirements and regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the financial services sector.
Financial services organizations face unique regulatory requirements due to the fact that their workloads are inherently sensitive, and Oracle has developed capabilities and practices to help customers in the financial services sector address requirements for DORA and other key industry regulations. As part of continuing efforts to help financial services customers perform their due diligence, Oracle developed the Advisory: Oracle Cloud Services and the European Outsourcing Guidelines (EBA, EIOPA, ESMA) to enable customers to evaluate OCI in the context of their regulatory outsourcing guidance. In addition, Oracle Cloud Regions – including the existing region and upcoming region in Madrid, as well as the EU Sovereign Cloud Region in Madrid – offer backup and disaster recovery solutions to help address customers' need for data availability and resilience.
In addition, OCI's sovereign AI capabilities provide customers with increased control over where they locate their data and computing infrastructure and how they manage it. As a result, customers can achieve AI sovereignty by gaining the assurance that their use of AI is aligned with data sovereignty frameworks.
OCI's unique cloud architecture enables Oracle to deploy dedicated cloud regions with hyperscale cloud services inside customer data centers and deploy more public cloud regions faster by starting with an optimal footprint and scaling as needed. This approach helps meet the needs of all countries and markets without compromising cloud capabilities, while also providing the consistent performance, SLAs, and global pricing for which OCI has become 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."
