Facebook Inc. said Wednesday it has decided that Singapore will be the location of its first Asian data center, and it will soon begin construction on a 170,000-square-meter facility in the country.

The new data center, to be built by Fortis Construction Inc., is projected to cost the social media giant just over $1 billion. Facebook said the project will also create “hundreds of new jobs,” not only during the construction, but also once it’s up and running.

Several factors led Facebook to conclude that Singapore was the ideal location for its first Asian data center, it said in a blog post announcing the decision. For one thing, Singapore was recently names at the “number-one country in Asia to do business” according to the World Bank. Singapore also boasts an excellent infrastructure, with existing communication lines and a skilled local workforce. The Singapore Economic Development Board and the Jurong Town Corporation have both also thrown their weight behind the project.

Facebook said it will be keeping with the trend in new data center construction to minimize the environmental impact of the project, ensuring that it builds a “hyper-efficient facility” that limits the use of water, energy and land as far as possible. No doubt the desired minimal impact on land use is the main reason why the new data center (pictured) will be so tall, as compared to the traditional low and wide data center buildings we see in the U.S.

The data center will also be the first to use Facebook’s new StatePoint Liquid Cooling System, which is designed for use in hot and arid climates and was announced earlier this year. The SPLC system was built in partnership with a company called Nortek Air Solutions and works by optimizing water and power consumption by switching between three different modes, based on the humidity and temperature outside.

The cooler the air outside is, the less energy is required to cool the water that’s used to stop the servers inside from overheating. Facebook said at the time that the SPLC system can get away with using around 50 percent less water than traditional cooling systems during “normal operations.”

The facility will also run on 100 percent renewable energy, mostly solar power, which is just as well since Singapore lies in the tropics and benefits from plenty of sunshine year-round.

Facebook is unique from other hyperscale data center operators such as Amazon.com Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. in that it hasn’t established a large international network of facilities. The company owns six data centers in the U.S., and just two outside of it, in Ireland and Sweden, with another being built in Denmark that’s set to open in 2020. The reason is that Facebook doesn’t provide public cloud services and so it has no need to offer the same kind of reliability from localized data centers as those companies.

Even so, Facebook requires a robust infrastructure, especially if it wants to grow new services it offers such as video-streaming and virtual reality, hence the decision to build a local facility to serve its millions of Asian customers.

Facebook said the Singapore data center should come online by 2022.

Image: Facebook