.

The social media giant added that the center will be powered by renewable energy and adapted to the city-state’s tropical climate. Facebook on Thursday said it will invest over $1 billion to build a data center in Singapore, its first in Asia.

The center is expected to be operational around 2022, and will host Facebook servers and centralize its IT operations, Thomas Furlong, Facebook vice president of infrastructure data centers, told reporters.

The 170,000 square meters (1.83 million square foot) site in the land-scarce city-state will be stacked over 11-storeys and will come with custom features to cope with the steamy temperatures, which rarely drop below 25 degrees Celsius (77 Fahrenheit).

These include a new state-of-the-art cooling system which uses water rather than air and will work better in the humidity, as well as a building facade made of perforated, lightweight material to allow for better air flow.

The Sg$1.4 billion ($1.02 billion) facility will be the first data centre designed and constructed by Facebook in Asia as the company increasingly relies on custom-built facilities to meet its needs, Furlong said.

It will be Facebook’s 15th data centre worldwide.