Global search engine giant Google Inc plans to double its investment in its new data center in Taiwan to US$600 million, in response to the fast-growing numbers of Internet users in the Asia-Pacific region.
“While we’ve been busy building, the growth in Asia’s Internet has been amazing,” Joe Kava, vice president of Google’s data centers unit, said yesterday at the opening of the company’s data center at the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park (彰化濱海工業區).
As Internet users in Asia account for half of global users, Google will boost its investment from the planned US$300 million to US$600 million, Kava said.
Photo: Chen Ping-hung, Taipei Times
Sitting on 15 hectares, the data center is the Mountain View, California-based company’s largest center in Asia. Google has more than 60 full-time employees assigned to perform tasks and maintain equipment at the Changhua center.
Kava said the facility is built to be energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. While the data center can work by cooling water at night when temperatures are cooler, it can also store the cooled water in large insulated tanks to cool servers during daytime, Kava said.
The Changhua center uses only about half of the power consumed by standard data centers on a daily basis, he added.
Google announced in 2011 its plan to build data centers in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. The company later canceled the plan to set up a center in Hong Kong, and opted to expand the one in Taiwan to serve users in Asia, Kava said.
The US company expects to inaugurate its new US$120 million data center in Jurong West, Singapore, later this month, the company said.
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