In a bid to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google has opened data centres in 4 countries and plans to launch in 5 more before 2019.

According to Yahoo, Google’s absence to China is costing the company business and making it harder to challenge AWS and Microsoft Azure in the rapidly expanding cloud infrastructure market.

By 2021, China’s market for cloud infrastructure and software is estimated to be more than US$9.8billion from US$2.4billion last year, according to IDC; with AWS and Microsoft partnering with local company, Beijing Sinnet Technology, for data centres in Shanghai and Beijing.

According to Synergy Research, Google already has a big gap to close, being fourth in global cloud infrastructure with 5% of the market, trailing AWS, azure and IBM.

“Google have a lot of other fish to fry”

Analyst at Gartner, Lydia Leong, said to Yahoo: “Google today is in so few countries –They have a lot of other fish to go fry.”

Google attempted to make a radical change in its operations in China, through breaking the country’s practices of censoring internet content by shutting down its local service and redirecting visitors from Google.cn to the uncensored Google.com.hk in Hong Kong, but the Chinese government objected to it, according to Yahoo.

Senior research manager at IDC, Richard Zhao, said: “We heard about Google’s plan of returning to China but so far there is not any clear message. They have to cooperate with local partners to run public cloud services.”

Written by Leah Alger