Facebook's facility will be located in the west of the island, near where Google is expanding its Singapore data centres in an $850 million investment as mobile growth, e-commerce and cloud computing demand rise across the region.

"This will be our first data centre in Asia," Thomas Furlong, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure data centres, said at a press conference with local authorities in Singapore.

He said the facility was expected to open in 2022 depending on the speed of construction.

Facebook said in a statement the 170,000 square metre facility represented an investment of more than S$1.4 billion ($1 billion) and would support hundreds of jobs.

Facebook has a number of data centres in the United States as well as Ireland and Sweden, and it is building a facility in Denmark.

"The data centre isn't country specific to where users are located...it's a dynamic process," said Furlong.

(Reporting by Fathin Ungku; Writing by John Geddie; Editing by Stephen Coates and Darren Schuettler)

By Fathin Ungku