“Google Inc. said Wednesday it will build its own data centers in Asia with an investment of more than $200 million as the U.S. Internet search giant looks to provide faster and more secure access to its services and customers that are growing in this region,” Yun-Hee Kim reports for Dow Jones Newswires.
“Google plans to build a data center in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong and has acquired land in each country,” Kim reports. “Data centers house computer, telecommunications and storage systems and typically include backup power supplies and security devices.”
Kim reports, “Once construction begins, Google expects the data centers to be operational within one to two years. In Singapore, Google has obtained 2.45 hectares of land in Jurong West, while in Taiwan it acquired 15 hectares of land in Changhua county. In Taiwan, the company expects the facility to add five to 20 full-time staff. In Hong Kong, the U.S. firm has acquired 2.7 hectares of land in Kowloon.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Why not build them here!?? Uh….., in the U.S.?
Do bits run faster in Asia or somethin’?
Obviously Google has seen the potential for growth in Asia and copying Apple’s model of expanding its presence in China by opening more stores in Hong Kong has decided to serve up search content with more of a local flavor to win over Asian advertisers.
I would think the idea is to have the information closer (thus faster to access) the people who ask for it. If you’re running a worldwide information business, you may end up wanting, at the very least, one data center per continent.
We know google has US data centers. So where’s a good place to put some more? Maybe an area of the world with large populations that are tech savvy and have the cash to spend.
Distributed cloud computing on mirrored sites serve two useful purposes. One is to create redundancy to protect against outages due to cable breaks affecting undersea international connections to the U.S. And two is to reduce search time latency by serving up bits within a peered local Internet infrastructure.
Speed is enhanced by being closer to the user. The notion of putting many smaller, but mobile data centers closer to users has been proposed before to speed up the net.
They want the data center closer to the censors.
Bits do run faster in China…their legs [regs] are shorter.
…bad double pun intended…
Googles massive spending binge continues. Unfortunately the internet ad market isn’t exactly drawing in the vast quantities of cash needed to support this rate of growth. Seems like google is well on the way to going for bust.
Yeah…, Good you bring this up.
Let me say this and see if it makes sense….
Those data centers are to support the searches people does when they choose the google engine. People will choose google whenever and if they feel they will get good and unbiased results from the engine. So, I believe google may be able to support that growth rate as long as its search engine remains unbiased so that people keep returning to do searches in google.
I’m not pro nor against google.
Wonderful! Now my browsing history and personal data will be available to anybody with $3.00 anywhere in Asia. More and more reason to avoid Google every day.
Is this a joke 200 million is too small to be spread across 3 countries .
Unless the data centers are speciality centers like for google docs and other online works.