SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Facebook <FB.O> said on Thursday it will invest more than $1 billion to build its first data center in Asia in Singapore, slated to open in 2022.
Facebook's facility will be located in the west of the island, near where Google <GOOGL.O> is expanding its Singapore data centers in an $850 million investment as mobile growth, e-commerce and cloud computing demand rise across the region.
"This will be our first data center in Asia," Thomas Furlong, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure data centers, said at a press conference with local authorities in Singapore.
He said the facility was expected to open in 2022 depending on the speed of construction.
Facebook said in a statement the 170,000 square meter facility represented an investment of more than S$1.4 billion ($1 billion) and would support hundreds of jobs.
Facebook has a number of data centers in the United States as well as Ireland and Sweden, and it is building a facility in Denmark.
"The data center isn't country specific to where users are located...it's a dynamic process," said Furlong.
(Reporting by Fathin Ungku; Writing by John Geddie; Editing by Stephen Coates and Darren Schuettler)
