Asian Nations Battle for Google Data Center

1sockchuck writes "Google is pitting foreign governments against one another in a battle for a major new data center in Asia. In the past week, both the prime minister of Malaysia and economic minister of Taiwan have said their countries are leading candidates for the Google project, with Japan, South Korea, India and Vietnam also mentioned as contenders in an 18-nation site selection process. Google typically invests $600 million in each new data center. Tech companies often use multi-site searches as a tool to coax incentives out of local governments, which sweeten their offers to outbid rivals from other regions. Google's Asian initiative appears to be taking this strategy to a new level, coaxing heads of state to invest political capital in their lust for one of Google's mega-datacenters."

Comments

Suitable Privacy Invasion Laws

[rtb61]

Google will be accepting bids from those countries that can show a long term commitment to the acceptability of the invasion of privacy of others and ensuring full legal protection for the use of that private data in any way that the googlite marketdroids choose ie. profits before privacy.

Those countries that show any signs of implementing strict laws to protect the privacy of their citizens as well a enforcing strict limits upon how personally, psychological targeted marketing will be, will consider themselves right out of the running.

I would personally hope that Australia is right out of the running and remains so, it would be embarrassing to be considered a suitable data warehouse for proctology inc.

Re:Why not the Philippines?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not Filipino, but I've been there a couple times and there are some reasons I can think of which make it a good place to house a data center:

A very good friend of mine is a Filipino, and the first time I talked about RPGs he thought I was referring to rocket-propelled grenades. Seriously. (And he used to live in the safe area.)

Things are more stable now (especially around Manilla), but there are regions you don't want to go to. A lot of people also drive around in cars with tinted windows: the police are less likely to pull you over because they don't know who's inside and don't want to get in trouble for pulling over the wrong person. Again, better then what was happening in the '80s, but hardly ideal.

My best guess for the winner would be Japan, especially in a southern region. You don't have to worry about the government going into your data (like China), and most of the other countries are with-in a decent fibre run of Japan. Taiwan you have to worry about hurting China's feelings (and the possibility of an eventual invasion). Quite a few cities in S. Korea are with-in artillery distance of N. Korea (even though relations have improved recently).

India should probably get its own, separate, data centre, with a bunch of fibre connections perhaps going to the MIddle East (especially to the UAE).

My $0.02.

Re:List of Google data centers?

[Rufus211]

No. Everything about their data centers is a closely guarded secret. Number and location of data centers, what each one does, how many cpus / ram / storage are in each one, etc. You can obviously piece bits together from news stories like these and various estimates given both by them and other people, but you'll never find hard numbers. They consider their computing power one of their competitive advantages, and treat information about it as such.