Google shies away from India

New Delhi:  Google Inc opened its first two data centres in Asia on Wednesday to cater to the world’s fastest growing consumer technology markets, but the company has no plans to open one in China or India.

Choosing Taiwan and Singapore instead illustrates the problem that tech companies face in trying to feed data demand in the world’s two most populous countries: With regulations in flux in India and cyberspace censorship in China, Google had to look next door.

Mobile data traffic in emerging Asia-Pacific countries will likely rise 68 per cent in 2014, well ahead of the global growth rate of 48 per cent and the fastest growing region in the world, according to Analysys Mason, a research consultancy.

Tech companies normally try to keep data centres as close to the customer base as possible because distance hurts speed. “While we’ve been busy building, the growth in Asia’s Internet has been amazing. The number of Internet users in India doubled, from 100 million to 200 million. It took six years to achieve that milestone in the US,” Google’s vice president of data centres, Joe Kava, said in a statement.

“And this growth probably won’t slow for some time, since the majority of people that have yet to come online also happen to live in Asia,” he said.

Kava said the cost of building the centres was one consideration for locating in Taiwan, but things like data privacy policies, a highly trained workforce and network infrastructure were equally important.

In India, Google dominates 97 per cent share of the search engine market, data from StatCounter showed.

“In India, the challenge is mostly the cost of infrastructure and the ability of building infrastructure,” said RadhaKrishna Hiremane, Intel Corp’s Asia-Pacific regional product marketing manager of data centre business, based in Singapore.