Microsoft is planning to build a US$9bn data center in Korea, the largest investment ever by a tech multinational in the country, Seoul based Arirang TV reported, citing officials from the company's Korean head office.
The Redmond, Washington, company has sent a site-selection team to the country, the English-language TV network said. Busan, the country's second largest city on the east coast, has emerged as a “strong candidate.”
Microsoft constantly expands its data center capacity around the world to support its 200-plus cloud services. Its infrastructure executives recently said there were approximately 1m servers in its data centers.
Ariran reported in 2011 that Microsoft was looking at Korea and Japan as potential locations for another Asian data center and was leaning toward the former. The company's Korea CEO James Woo said at the time that Korea was more attractive because of Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami that took place earlier that year.
Microsoft has been investing a lot into infrastructure over the past few years as it refashions itself from a software vendor into a services company. Its cloud portfolio includes everything from its traditional software offerings provided as a service to Platform- and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings under the Windows Azure brand.
Another recent expansion by Microsoft in Asia was in Shanghai through Chinese data center services provider 21Vianet. The company provided facilities for hosting Windows Azure infrastructure.
In May 2013, Microsoft announced plans to expand Windows Azure infrastructure to two regions in Japan and two regions in Australia. It also has Azure data centers in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The company cited an IDC forecast that said the size of Asia's cloud computing market (excluding Japan) would reach $16.3bn by 2016.
Microsoft is also building a data center in Brazil and expanding its already massive data center presence in Dublin, Ireland, and in the US, in Quincy, Washington.
In January, in a eyebrow-raising announcement, the company said it would open source the latest servers it designed to support all of its cloud services through the Open Compute Project – a Facebook-led open source hardware design effort.
Bill Laing, corporate VP of Windows Server and System Center development, told us then that release of the newest design also marked a change in the company's cloud infrastructure strategy. Instead giving every service team control over what type of hardware and how much of it they buy to support their particular service, all services will be supported by one type of server.
The company expects to save on hardware purchases as a result, because it can order much higher volumes. It will also benefit from a uniform hardware refresh cycle and easier capacity planning.