Google Cloud and Telefónica are partnering to make advances into the burgeoning 5G mobile Edge market.

As part of the deal, Google Cloud has announced a new cloud region in Madrid, Spain, that will leverage Telefónica's infrastructure.

The region will consist of three zones and offer the usual set of Google Cloud Platform products, such as Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Cloud Storage, Spanner, and BigQuery.

Telefónica will use Google Cloud services in areas such as in AI, data analytics, and application development to help it produce more products for its customers.

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– Telefónica

Cyber alliance

José María Álvarez-Pallete, chairman and CEO Telefónica, said: "With our alliance with Google Cloud, we want to fulfill our social commitment and foster the recovery of the economy helping companies, the public administration and all types of organizations not only to recover the ground lost by the crisis but also to promote their digital transformation and strengthen themselves for the future."

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, added: "We're excited to be partnering with Telefónica to launch a new cloud region in Spain and help Spanish businesses big and small find new ways to innovate and contribute to the country's economic recovery."

Calling it an alliance, the two companies say this will strengthen their previous collaborations in areas such as security.

Back in 2019, Google Cloud and Telefónica signed an agreement between Telefonica's ElevenPaths and Google's Chronicle to reach a wider market for their security analytics services in Europe and Latin America.

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Google's Sundar Pichai at the Anthos announcement last year – Google

Mustering friends at the network edge

In March, Google Cloud announced it was developing Anthos for Telecom, to bring the company's cloud application platform to the mobile network edge.

Anthos lets organizations manage workloads using the same interface on Google Cloud and rival clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure.

Along with the announcement, the company unveiled a strategy to help the telecommunications industry harness the potential of 5G and improve operational efficiencies in core telecom systems. Google Cloud said that it would partner with AT&T to test a portfolio of 5G Edge computing solutions for industries like retail, manufacturing, transportation.

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