Google Starts Work on Data Center in Taiwan

Photo: ithome.com.tw

Internet search giant Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) today announced that it has started building a new data center in Changhua County in Taiwan, and has plans for limited testing and bringing it online in the second half of 2013.

This will be the third data center for Google in Asia, as it’s also working on two others which have yet to be completed. Those two centers in Singapore and Hong Kong are both scheduled to be completed in early 2013. But according to Google, the Taiwan data center will “be the first in [its] fleet to save energy through a nighttime cooling and thermal energy storage system.”

Google will also be hiring locally, and has a few positions listed on its website relating to the new data center.

The investment in this Taiwan facility is more than $300 million, part of more than $700 million that the company is spending in the region. It’s all part of Google’s efforts to ensure that users in the region can access its services quickly and reliably.

Of course, the majority of Asia’s internet users are from China — specifically 50.5 percent of them according to the most recent figures from Internet World Stats. Google is still operating in China, but navigates difficult waters with its Chinese search service now redirecting to its Hong Kong search.

[Data in map from Internet World Stats, as of December 2011]