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Comment by mjs | Hacker News Reader

For a global company, Facebook has a surprising uneven distribution of data centers:

  - Continental US: 14 operating or under construction
  - Europe: 3 (all operating)
  - Everywhere else: 1 (Singapore, under construction)

https://datacenters.fb.com

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Singapore real estate is so sparse, I'm surprised they even have room for a datacenter of any notable size.

They were also surprisingly late at building their own datacenters for a company of their size, and ran in colo facilities like 200 Paul Avenue in San Francisco for a very long time.

I wonder if it might be because US datacenters are older and were not built to the same scales as newer datacenters.

I can also imagine that the local datacenters are just the equivalent of 'last mile', serving only that which needs to be handled directly, and data is passed asynchronously to the US for larger scale processing and analysis. Makes more sense if they have better (or cheaper) datacenter personnel in the US, or if things like equipment, electricity are cheaper over there.

For last mile they for sure have agreements with ISPs worldwide for collocated boxes similar to Netflix. These should just be hardcore compute.

All three datacenters in Europe is also in Northern Europe and not exactly close to major internet exchanges.

This is mostly for regulatory reasons.

Singapore has very good connectivity for Asia, specially to India, FB's largest market, to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

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