Google Cloud will launch its Los Angeles region in July

It’s no secret that Google has long planned to open a cloud region in Los Angeles. The company has long said that a second region on the U.S. West Coast was in the works, after all. What we didn’t know for sure was when this new region would go live. But as Google announced today, the new Los Angeles cloud region will go live in July, making it the company’s fifth region in the U.S.

During an event in Los Angeles today, Google specifically positioned this region as ideal for the media and entertainment industry in the area. “The LA region will provide our media and entertainment customers with fast, scalable compute resources, so visual effects and animation studios can spend less time waiting on renders, and more time bringing their creative visions to life,” Google notes in its announcement today.

But beyond this focus on entertainment, it’s worth noting that this new region now also gives every company that bets on the Google Cloud platform a second West Coast option besides its Oregon region. That’s not what Google is focusing on today, though. The company’s event and blog posts all focus on the various rendering tools like Zync Render, which Google acquired back in 2014, and Anvato, a video streaming and monetization platform it acquired in 2016.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft Azure already offers a region in Southern California, though AWS does not.