The Silicon Review ^Asia

Google is all set to build its third data center in Taiwan. The U.S. tech giant has stated that the island's location is strategically well suited for an Asian data transfer hub. The company is building a huge data center in a 200,000-sq.-meter, the plot in Douliu, a city in central Taiwan, and expects to start operations around 2022. It is said that the investment is assumed to be worth 20 billion New Taiwan dollars ($681 million).

“Google selected Taiwan because of the island's geographic advantages; the company's told reporters Thursday. Multiple deep-sea communication cables connecting the U.S. and Asia pass through Taiwan, making the island an increasingly key location to build data centers,” Lin said regional general manager of Google stated. The data center will be functional by the end of 2021.

This will be Google's fourth data center in Asia. Taiwan's Changhua County hosts the initial facility, which went online in 2013. Another data center was built in Singapore. In September 2019, Google announced a plan to build a second Taiwanese data center in Tainan. As the demand for online services has mounted during the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. tech heavyweights are expanding data center operations. Google says it has over 10 data centers in North America, one in Chile, and another five in Europe.