Google opens two data centers in Asia

Google has announced that the new data centers setup in Taiwan and Singapore are operational. This marks the official entry of Google infrastructure in Asia. Singapore is already the Asian hub for data center with Microsoft, Amazon, SoftLayer, NTT, Tata Communications and others running their infrastructure.

Acknowledging the growth in the Internet usage, Joe Kava, Vice President of Data Centers at Google said, “While we’ve been busy building, the growth in Asia’s Internet has been amazing. The number of Internet users in India doubled, from 100 million to 200 million. It took six years to achieve that milestone in the U.S. Between July and September of this year alone, more than 60 million people in Asia landed on the mobile Internet for the first time. That’s almost two Canadas, or three Australias. And this growth probably won’t slow for some time, since the majority of people that have yet to come online also happen to live in Asia.”

Google’s original plan included a $300 million data center in Hong Kong. It got dropped due to the concerns of Chinese censorship and the on going tension between China and US over the NSA issue.

Speaking to the Economic Times in Jan 2013, Lalitesh Katragadda, Country Head, India Products at Google said, "Internet connectivity speed in India is not very high. These data centres will be crucial to this market due to its proximity”.

Last week, Google’s cloud infrastructure services became generally available. Google Compute Engine (GCE) is available only in US and Europe data centers as of now. The official announcement about the new data centers in Asia did not mention how this would impact GCE. With most of its competitors operating their cloud from Singapore, it is a matter of time before Google starts offering their cloud platform to the Asia Pacific customers.