Facebook is considering building a $300m data center in Taiwan, which would be its first facility in the Asia Pacific region. 

The company has contacted the Taiwaneses authorities to explore building a data center in one of six possible sites. Facebook would need six acres (2.43 hectares) of land, which could expand to 20 acres in future, according to reports on Reuters.  

‘We hope they will come…’

“We’ve made all-out efforts to ensure sufficient supply of water and electricity,” said Magistrate Wei Ming-ku of Changhua County in central Taiwan. ”We hope they will come.” 

Facebook says it has not made a decision yet, with an official statement saying that, as a global company with billions of subcribers round the world, it is “always evaluating potential sites for new data centres.”

Chunghua County is a likely destination, given that Google already has a data center there, which has already been expanded in 2015. The Google facility has a wind turbine and uses thermal energy storage so it can take advantage of lower-cost night-time electricity for its cooling systems.

There’s also plenty of appropriate tech expertise in the country. Taiwan is home to Quanta, one of the leaders in delivering web-scale data center hardware built according to specifications form the Facebook-inspired Open Compute Project. 

It’s also the location of AtGames, which stepped in a year ago to save ARM processor maker Calxeda and promise the SilverLining ARM-based low-power rack-based systems - though nothing has been heard yet.