I'm surprised that neither have any datacenters in India. Does anyone know why this might be?

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.

Wow. Thank you for not bending over on the private key issue. That's terrible.

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

That's not quite the answer he gave to this exact question in the video: geopolitics and cost were the major reasons, they want pops there.

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.)

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.

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

I wonder what the reasons behind their similar distribution are.

One is surely the density of users, but maybe there are others related to the actual hosting, like cost, law or infrastructure.

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.

Too bad for Africa and Australia.

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.