Google’s first data centers in Asia go online to help serve the growing Internet population

Google has announced that its two new data centers in Asia, based in Taiwan and Singapore, are now online. Following yesterday’s news that the company has scrapped plans for a third data center in Hong Kong, Google says it is doubling its budget for the Taiwan-based site, which will now see its total investment reach $600 million.

As more consumers and businesses take to the cloud for email, file sharing, and other services, Google has been a beneficiary. To handle the load, it’s been building more and more data centers around the world to compute and run it all. So the news that Google is backing off its plans to build a data center in Hong Kong — and instead expand others in Asia — comes as a surprise.