14 DAY TRIAL // Malaysian Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, told the AFP that Google was interested in setting up a base in his home country. "They want to make their presence felt in Malaysia. It will be a big boost for our ICT (information and communications technology) industry," Abdullah told Malaysian journalists at the Forum in Davos.
The fact that the Asian market is growing in Internet usage and growing fast is no longer a secret. The fact that Google, who reportedly considered three countries (India, Malaysia and Vietnam) as its next base of operations, just goes to prove it. Looks like the people over at the Mountain View-based company's headquarters have finally decided. "I was told that Malaysians formed the highest group of Google users in Southeast Asia," Abdullah confided to The Star Daily.
The project is to create the biggest server farm in the world, "a cluster of powerful computers used to store data," as the AFP explained. What's most important is not that the server will be dominant and that it is needed (or else it wouldn't have been planned, just for the sakes of it). This also means that Google will probably be trying to expand its services in Asian local languages, to better match the growing demand. There's a lot of people there, and such a project would also create a lot of job openings, helping the local economy as well.
Perhaps Malaysia was chosen because of its Multimedia Super Corridor, launched from scratch about ten years ago. For those who don't know what it means, it is the equivalent of California's Silicon Valley, and being able to set it up as quickly as they did means a lot towards availability and openness, just what Google seems to be looking for.
If robots have a starting base for taking over the world, that's going to be it. Really! With all the information there, they'll place an order for home delivery in your name for our favorite pizza, sprayed with poison. That's my biggest recurring nightmare, so if I hear of just one case of this happening, I know where I'll be and what I'll be bombing.