Google will double its investment in a data centre it is building in Taiwan as internet use in Asia rockets beyond what the US internet group predicted a few years ago when it first planned the site, one of its first two Asia data centres.

The search company already invested $300m in the massive centre on a flat plain outside a city in central Taiwan, and says it will double that in the next stages of the data centre’s development.

“Between July and September this year, more than 60m people in Asia got on to mobile internet for the first time; about as many people as live in all the United Kingdom,” said Scott Beaumont, Google’s managing director of greater China. The growth is “really quite staggering and we’re really just beginning”, he said.