Google tips US$300m in HK data centre

Goes APAC skills hunting.
Google will spend US$300 million on a new data centre in Hong Kong as part of its planned expansion into Asia Pacific.

The new 27,000 square metre facility will be located in an industrial estate in Hong Kong's Kowloon area and will employ 25 people. 

The facility is expected to come online in early 2013, Google Hardware Operations manager, Simon Chang said in a statement. 

"We're working as quickly as we can to get this facility operational so we can keep up with rapid growth in capacity demand across the region." Chang said.

The search giant revealed in September that it would spend at least $200 million on new data centers in the Asia Pacific region, with plans to build two others in Singapore and Taiwan.

Google also has a small caching facility in Sydney, Australia.

It is currently on the hunt a raft of engineers and negotiators to support its APAC expansion These include a data centre project manager to oversee the construction and operations of large scale server farms, two negotiators to "spearhead the acquisition and allocation of Google's global networking infrastructure" and structure deals with mobile and SMS carriers, and a network deployment engineer.