Facebook Inc is assessing the feasibility of investing NT$10 billion (US$303.92 million) on building its first Asia-Pacific data center in Taiwan, following the lead of search engine Google Inc, a local government official said.
Facebook is scouting potential sites for its first Asia data center in Taiwan and the company has expressed interest through a consulting company in building a facility in Changhua County, Changhua County Commissioner Wei Ming-ku (魏明谷) said on Facebook on Monday.
The social media giant planned to invest NT$10 billion on the data center and requested a 6 hectare site for the facility in the initial phase, Wei said, adding that Facebook also planned to more than triple the facility’s scale to 20 hectares in the second phase of its operation.
The local government is working with related agencies to solve water and electricity supply problems, Wei said.
“As a global company working to connect billions of people around the world, we are always evaluating potential sites for new data centers, but we do not have anything to announce at this time,” Facebook said in an e-mailed statement.
Facebook has about 1.55 billion monthly active users, with 522 million users from the Asia-Pacific region, as of the third quarter of this year, according to the company’s financial statement. That indicates the Asia-Pacific region is the company’s largest market.
In July, Facebook announced that it had decided to locate its fifth data center in Fort Worth, Texas. The data center is to be fully powered by renewable energy, including 200 megawatts of wind energy the company helped bring to the Texas grid.
Facebook operates four other data centers in Oregon, North Carolina and Sweden.
Google has been operating its Taiwan data center, located in Changhua County, since December 2013. The US company has invested US$600 million in the data center, which is the largest Asia facility operated by Google.
Minister of Economic Affairs John Deng (鄧振中) yesterday said state-run Taiwan Power Co would ensure sufficient power supply for Facebook, if the California-based company decides to build its first Asian data center in Taiwan.
Deng said he cannot comment on new investment projects from any individual company as the ministry has signed non-disclosure agreements with those companies. Deng made the remarks on the sideline of a forum on emerging markets.
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