Microsoft’s new cloud datacenter region in Qatar finally goes live

Aug 23, 2022

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of its newest datacenter region in Qatar, located in Doha. The new Qatar Central region will start offering Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform services. The Qatar datacenter region includes three Azure Availability Zones, which will offer additional resiliency for customer applications. Other available non-Microsoft technology services are SAP, NetApp, Snowflake, Adobe, and MongoDB. The investment was first announced in 2019 in partnership with the State of Qatar.

The new Qatar region offers the following to customers:

  • Data residency in country.
  • In country Disaster Recovery through zone to zone synchronous replication.
  • High Availability of computing and storage by deploying in three zones allowing a higher service level agreement on virtual machines availability and storage durability.
  • Improved performance through minimal latency for workloads deployed within Zones, to meet our most exigent customer latency-sensitive workloads.
datacenter region in Qatar Microsoft

Microsoft says it has delivered on its promise to help in Qatar’s journey to becoming a regional data hub with the launch of the datacenter. Additionally, the company is introducing a skilling program to help improve the technical skills of Qatarians to meet the about 24,000 new jobs the industry will need.

Microsoft notes this will be its first cloud region to launch with two ExpressRoute points of presence (Edge nodes). AI and machine learning services such as Azure Cognitive Search and services, computer vision are expected in Q3 of 2022.

In June, Microsoft opened an advanced innovation hub in Lusail City as it seeks to increase its investments in Qatar.

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