As of 2014, Google Inc. owned and operated six Google Modular Data Centers across the U.S., one in Chile, one in Finland, one in Ireland, one in Belgium, one in Singapore and one on Taiwan.[149] In 2011, the company had announced plans to build three data centers at a cost of more than $200 million in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and said they would be operational within two years.[150][151]
In October 2013, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted communications between Google's data centers, as part of a program named MUSCULAR.[152][153] This wiretapping was made possible because Google did not encrypt data passed inside its own network.[154] Google began encrypting data sent between data centers in 2013.[155]