Oracle announced the opening of its first cloud region in France to support the increasing cloud computing demands of private and public sector organizations. The Oracle Cloud Marseille Region will provide customers and partners access to all Oracle Cloud services to drive business growth. Oracle's next-generation cloud is now available in 32 regions worldwide with plans to have at least 44 cloud regions by the end of 2022, continuing one of the fastest expansions of any major cloud provider. Oracle Cloud services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Cloud VMware are now available from Marseille for customers that require their data to remain in France. This will help organizations in the banking industry and public sector meet important regulatory compliance requirements. In addition, Oracle offers a wide range of application modernization and cloud strategies to help French organizations operate with global competitiveness. The cloud region is strategically located in Marseille, a top ten global internet hub that is also the fastest growing in the world, which is a major confluence point for submarine cables used for international data transmission. Oracle also plans to open a second cloud region in France in 2022. The second cloud region in France is part of Oracle's unique dual-region cloud strategy, which helps customers meet business continuity and compliance requirements by enabling them to deploy resilient applications in multiple geographically separated locations ? without having sensitive data leave the country. In addition to the dual-region strategy that optimizes data access, OCI's next-generation architecture provides a resilient, high-performance foundation for cloud services, while its physical and virtual network design optimizes performance and security. And as with every Oracle Cloud region, the Marseille region contains three fault domains, which are clusters of hardware that form logical data centers, to ensure high availability and resiliency to hardware and network failures. The Marseille region strengthens Oracle's extensive network in the European Union, with Frankfurt and Amsterdam already available, Milan and Stockholm due to open later this year, and Spain opening in 2022. Oracle's strategy is to meet customers where they are, enabling customers to keep data and services where they need it. Customers can deploy Oracle Cloud completely within their own data centers with Dedicated Region and Exadata Cloud@Customer, deploy cloud services locally with public cloud-based management, or deploy cloud services remotely on the edge with Roving Edge Infrastructure. Oracle is committed to sustainability and has pledged to power all Oracle Cloud regions worldwide with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Several Oracle Cloud regions, including regions in North America, South America, and Europe are already powered by 100% renewable energy, and all Oracle Cloud regions use state-of-the-art energy management and cooling technologies to minimize their impact on the environment. To keep server temperatures down, the Marseille region relies on a "river cooling" based heat exchange system which is 30 times more energy-efficient than conventional cooling systems. This minimizes the cloud region's impact on the environment and makes it one of the most efficient in the country. As part of its renewable energy clean Cloud initiative, Oracle reused or recycled 99.6% of its retired hardware in fiscal year 2021 while strictly adhering to Oracle's data privacy and security practices.