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In the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, cloud, data, and a high chance of growth are all in the forecast. This year, Google is investing $2 billion in data center and cloud services in Malaysia, and has spent $5 billion in Singapore after completing the expansion of a data center and cloud infrastructure there, Forbes reported.
“The recent investments by hyperscalers and by Akamai signal that the cloud is about to become the ephemeral, flexible, automated, self-healing cloud of the future,” Jay Jenkins, CTO of cloud computing at Akamai Technologies, told IT Brew via Akamai PR strategist Michael Maney in an email.
Akamai launched new edge computing locations this year in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—and already has locations in Singapore, Chennai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Osaka, Jakarta, Sydney, and Melbourne.
“APAC is a big area of continued growth and investment for Google,” Rebecca Wong, Google’s head of APAC cloud communications, also told us in an email. The two Malaysia and Singapore investments “build on our growing regional infrastructure footprint that includes data centres in three countries and cloud regions in 11 cities in APAC,” she said.
Amazon is also plowing billions into the region; this year, AWS has announced expenditures in Taiwan, a $9 billion investment in Singapore’s cloud infrastructure, and more than $15 billion in Japan to “expand cloud computing infrastructure” for AI services by 2027, Reuters reported. When we asked Amazon how much it would invest in Taiwan, AWS’ PR manager for the Taiwan regionWeina Chen declined to share the amount but said it was “multiple billions of dollars.”
Mallika Joshi, APJ strategic communications manager at AWS, shared a slew of other examples with IT Brew, highlighting how the company plans to invest billions in the data and cloud space in Australia, India, Indonesia, Korea, New Zealand, and Thailand.
“As markets mature, it’s important for cloud companies to invest in the region today in order to embed their technology in the talent pool to be a part of that growth,” Jenkins, who’s based in Singapore, said. “The current growth only scratches the surface.”