FILE PHOTO: The logo of Google is seen at the high profile startups and high tech leaders gathering, Viva Tech,in Paris, France May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google expects to triple its customer workforce to support cloud computing services in Latin America by the end of next year, Google Cloud’s director in Brazil, João Bolonha, said on Thursday.

“This growth has already started and we’ve been expanding teams in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Colombia,” he told journalists at the Google Cloud Summit in São Paulo.

According to the U.S. tech giant, its total capital expenditures globally hit $47 billion over the past three years and the plan is to keep investing.

“Inside Latin America, Brazil is our largest market (in cloud computing) and the one with the fastest growth,” Bolonha said, adding that customer consumption of cloud computing solutions rose over 300% in 2018.

He gave no details on the current size of Google’s Latin American workforce, or on the number of cloud computing services jobs it planned to add.

But Bolonha said less than 20% of the companies in Brazil are currently using cloud computing services in their operations, meaning there is still a lot of room to grow despite increasing competition from other players such as Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of U.S. e-commerce group Amazon.com.

“Competition is fiercer in some specific industries such as retail, but there is still 80 percent of the market to be explored,” Bolonha said.

(This story corrects paragraph 3 as Google says capex information it erroneously provided was global total, not just for cloud computing services)