Google building third Singapore data center

Estimated to cost US$350 million, the new facility will support Southeast Asia's growing online consumption and tap machine learning technology to reduce energy use, Google says.

Google Data Center

Google is building a third data center in Singapore to support growing online consumption in Southeast Asia, pushing its overall investment in such facilities in the country to US$850 million.

More than 70 million consumers in the region had come online for the first time over the last three years, which meant its total online population of more than 300 million was larger than the United States, said Google's vice president of data centers Joe Kava, in a blog post-Wednesday.

A growing number of businesses also were heading online, Kava said, adding that this momentum was fuelling demand for its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services.

The vendor launched its first GCP region in Singapore last year, which currently had a clientele that included Singapore Airlines, Carousel, Ninjavan, MyRepublic, and Wego. The third data center would help meet such growing demand, he said.

Located in Jurong West, the new site was within the same vicinity as the vendor's first two data centers and would cost an estimated US$300 million. This would push the total investment in building out its data center footprint here to US$850 million, following its first such facility in 2011 and second in 2015. Google had said, during the launch of the second data center that its investment, thus far, had been US$500 million.

Kava added that the third, multi-storey site would tap machine learning technology to reduce energy consumption as well as recycled water, which meant it would not contribute any waste to landfill.

Google Cloud's Asia-Pacific Japan managing director Rick Harshman said: "Over the last two years, Google Cloud has expanded its footprint in Asia and this growth has helped power what we recently announced at Alphabet earnings--Google Cloud making over US$1 billion in revenue per quarter globally."

Harshman pointed to the establishment of its first Cloud Platform Region as well as the third Cloud Platform Zone in Singapore.

Google in April launched a local version of its online store, offering a range of its hardware products including Google Home and Home Mini.

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