Google announced the expansion of its Cloud Platform to the Asia-Pacific region, including locally-hosted computing capacity, storage, and databases.  The company said in a blog post that this is inline with its strategy for expanding into the Asia-Pacific region.  This follows the opening of data centers in Taiwan and Singapore at the end of last year.

The standard Compute Engine instances cost from $0.077 per hour, which is the same as in Europe, but slightly more than in the U.S.  However, I expect prices to drop as Google expands sales in those regions.

The move to the Asia-Pacific region follows others, such as AWS.  Cloud providers are counting on a quickly expanding Asia-Pacific market, and will certainly open more centers there as the region shows growth.

Companies in the Asia-Pacific region have shown that cloud computing is a desirable path for them, given the flexibility and cost efficiency this technology is likely to provide.  However, there are still concerns about the US spying upon data, and perhaps even privacy issues around local governments in Asia.