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Comment by brobinson | Hacker News Reader

Both Google and Facebook both have datacenters/PoPs in Taiwan? I can't imagine the 24mm people there justify it, and both services are either largely unused or blocked in the nearby PRC...

I'm more surprised that Google has no presence in Japan, though.

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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

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...

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

More precisely, Taiwan is well connected by direct cables to Japan, China, Philippines, Viet Nam, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, Singapore and the US. As far as I'm aware Google owns a cable connecting Taiwan with Japan (part of [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTER_(cable_system)

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.

load and network conditions (paths from you to Tokyo are experiencing packet loss for $REASONS, Singapore is overloaded/broken/full, etc).

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

but plenty of Google Global Caches, so performance (latency to cached objects and DNS queries) is still quite good

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