My intuition tells me it's a combination of:

* They eventually will build one, but Indian consumers are (as of right now) less valuable to them (from an ad targeting perspective) than other geographies e.g. the economic/time/effort investment ROI is better elsewhere in the short term

* SE Asia (and their POPs there) have reasonable connectivity to India, so it might good enough for the time being

Cost was a smaller factor than politics; the Indian government wanted the private keys for our certs in order to let FB put a POP there. That was an absolute dealbreaker, so we served India from Singapore and other POPs in nearby countries.

Regarding building a datacenter, that's much higher risk since it's a $100M-1B capital investment. I'm guessing both Facebook and Google see too much volatility to make the risk worth it. It could be an expensive paperweight if the Indian government changed their minds.

Google has announced a region for Mumbai (India) coming this year: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/

(Can't/won't speculate as to why not earlier.)

Google has an office in Tokyo but I guess not a datacenter.

They fixed that, at least for GCP. How the other Google bits fit into that, I do not know. They're planning to expand to a bunch of new regions this year.

https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/google-cloud-pla...

They do. The above map is wholly owned DCs, but there are many more PoPs, and an enormous number of edge cache locations: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

There's a major Asia-Pacific undersea cable connected to Taiwan, so Taiwan is a useful Asia-Pacific gateway.

In my experience, having a PoP in Taiwan, means that some data requests from S. Korea, Philippines, and Australia are routed to that.

I never know how that works, since Singapore and Tokyo, Japan should be closer---but it still happens.

infrastructure : electricity, roads, price of land, availability of workforce, water, temeprature, closeness to the backbones.

Add that to the density of users and the timing they expect. Once you factor all that, you end up with a limited amount of possibilities.

Both companies have looked for optimal choices, taking into account all factor, it is logic that they ended up with the same answers.

Yeah, massive surprise for me to see Australia/NZ not have anything dedicated. Network reliability over the whole region must be pretty poor and although in population terms it's probably too low, you'd think in purchasing power terms it would still be worth it.