Social media company Facebook have announced that they will be investing USD 1.4 billion at their Singapore data center, their first in Asia. With this investment, Facebook seeks to support messaging, virtual reality and video-streaming services that are in much demand in the Asian market.
Facebook say that the Asian market is experiencing a boom with respect to data center services as a result of the fast adoption of cloud products. They believe that this market still holds huge potential for growth since only specific segments and industries have deployed cloud technology.
The social media company believes that in spite of them not being a public cloud platform, the services they provide requires infrastructural support that needs cloud hosting. They also claim that if they need to provide messaging and video-streaming services at scale, having a local data center that accommodates a large number of customers is a must.
By investing USD 1.4 billion, Facebook say that they will be building a 170,000 sq.meter hub in Singapore over a period of four years. They reveal that this data center will be furnished with state-of-the-art technology that can manage multiple workloads with ease.
Speaking about this move, Thomas Furlong, Vice President for Infrastructure Data Centers at Facebook, commented:
User growth in Asia is very rapid, and having a data center close is good as we can serve our users better. The Facebook data center will host many of the pictures and videos that you see everyday.
Facebook claim that at present they have six data centers in the U.S. with a new hub being built in Denmark to support their European users. They added that by adding this new center in Singapore, Facebook will create hundreds of job opportunities in the region.
It will be interesting to witness how Facebook take this ahead, especially after Google expanded their cloud footprint to Singapore last month.