LinkedIn, one of the world’s largest social networking site for business professionals, has just announced yesterday that it has opened a S$80 million data centre in Singapore, making it the first data centre outside of the United States.
According to the media release, the new data centre spans 23,500 square feet in Jurong (29A International Business Park), and is built to enhance the experience for the LinkedIn members and clients across the Asia Pacific region. The new data centre in Singapore will now process all of LinkedIn’s online traffic in the Asia Pacific region and will also handle about a third of global traffic.
LinkedIn also revealed that since January 2013, the number of LinkedIn members in the Asia Pacific more than doubled to reach over 85 million members at the end of 2015. Over 1 million members are in Singapore.
LinkedIn also counts prominent leaders as its influencers, including Narendra Modi (Prime Minister of India), Piyush Gupta (CEO of DBS Bank), Tony Fernandes (Group CEO of AirAsia), Shinzo Abe (Prime Minister of Japan) and Andrew Penn (CEO of Telstra). Over the same period, LinkedIn’s revenue in the region more than tripled.
“Asia Pacific is our fastest growing region in terms of member base outside of the US. We are investing to make sure we continue to provide a great experience as our business continues to grow in this region”, said Olivier Legrand, Managing Director of LinkedIn in Asia Pacific.
This is particularly important to us because the data centre is the first ever data centre outside of the United States, and the company worked with Singapore’s Economic Development Board to establish the new data centre. This is in line with EDB’s vision for Singapore to be the digital capital of Asia. And the fact that Singapore has managed to attract such as huge capital investment from a company like LinkedIn means that global companies are confident with the infrastructure and everything else that Singapore has to offer.
Other than LinkedIn, other digital companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and more have also set up their Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore over the past few years.