Facebook said on Thursday it will invest more than $1 billion to build its first data center in Asia in Singapore, slated to open in 2022.

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

"This will be our first data center in Asia," said Thomas Furlong, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure data centers.

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

Facebook said the 170,000 square meter 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 centers in the United States as well as Ireland and Sweden, and it is building a facility in Denmark.