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Google Cloud Opens Tokyo Region: What Asia-Northeast1 Means

Google’s Tokyo region, asia-northeast1, opened in 2016 as the company’s second Asian region. Here’s what the launch did—and how to evaluate regions today.
From TheFinanceBase Team3 min to read
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Google opened its Tokyo Google Cloud region, asia-northeast1, on November 8, 2016. The launch gave Japanese customers a nearby location for Google Cloud services and made Tokyo the company’s second region in Asia after Taiwan. The announcement’s latency figures and region counts describe that 2016 launch, not Google Cloud’s current footprint or performance.

When did Google Cloud open its Tokyo region?

Google announced the region was open for business on November 8, 2016. In March of that year, the company had said a Japan region was planned for the second half of 2016, describing it as the East Asia region in Japan. Its eventual code was asia-northeast1. Google’s launch announcement said the opening brought the number of Google Cloud zones in Asia from three to six.

Google’s stated reason for adding Tokyo was to put compute, storage, and networking services closer to Japanese businesses. The company described low latency and high performance as key considerations when choosing where to deploy resources.

What did Google report about Tokyo latency?

Google said its testing found average latency was 50–85% lower when serving users in Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, and Nagoya from Tokyo rather than Taiwan. This was a Google-reported comparison from 2016, not an independently verified benchmark. The available announcement excerpt does not give the test methodology, and the result should not be assumed to apply to every workload or to current service performance.

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At the launch, Tatsuya Tsuruoka, then a Principal Engineer at Mercari, said: “Now that the Tokyo region is open, we can use GCP for other services that have low-latency requirements.”

Does Google Cloud have regions in Japan?

Yes. Tokyo opened in 2016, and Osaka became Japan’s second Google Cloud region when Google announced it was open on May 14, 2019. Google’s Osaka announcement described three zones and services including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery. That list reflects the Osaka launch announcement; it should not be treated as a current service inventory.

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For present-day availability, consult Google Cloud’s current locations information and check the specific product in the region you plan to use. The page, updated September 23, 2026, notes that service availability varies by region and changes with customer demand.

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How should a business choose a Google Cloud region?

The Tokyo opening is useful historical context, but choosing a region today requires checking the needs of the particular application. Google’s locations information points to a region picker that weighs carbon footprint, price, and latency. Consider these factors together:

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  • Service availability: Confirm that each required Google Cloud product is offered in the specific region; availability is not uniform across regions.
  • User latency: Evaluate performance from the locations where application users or systems actually connect. The 2016 Tokyo-versus-Taiwan result is not a substitute for an application-specific assessment.
  • Data location: Determine the location requirements that apply to the service and its configuration. A region name alone does not establish an exact facility address or a data-residency guarantee.
  • Resilience: Plan how the application will handle failures across zones or regions, based on its availability and recovery requirements.
  • Price and environmental considerations: Compare the relevant regional options using Google’s current tools and service information.

A 2022 Japanese Fair Trade Commission report stated that Google had data centers in Tokyo and Osaka as of May 2022. It also cautioned that cloud region names indicate geographic locations but do not necessarily mean facilities are physically inside the named prefectures. For a particular compliance or residency requirement, verify the applicable service terms and configuration rather than inferring an exact site from “Tokyo” or “Osaka.” Japanese Fair Trade Commission report.

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