North America and Europe are lucky to have so many Google data centers. India, Africa, and Australia have none. Russia and South America each have 1. And China has only 2.

I don't think luck has anything to do with it :/ Probably more a business decision based on many factors.

Come on. It would be pretty unlucky if you had to rely on a server 8000 miles away.

Unfortunate? Perhaps. Unlucky? No.

I find it fascinating that a company who is generally pretty open and transparent about most things(outside of adsense and search algorithms) is so secretive about something as trivial as data centers. Probably want to avoid terrorism or corporate espionage I'd wager.

Secrecy, shell corporations in particular, save them a lot of money before a data center is operational.

Once a data center is operational, it harbors significant trade secrets in terms of efficiency. Google is so frequently open because they stand to benefit from it. They don't benefit by lowering the cost of data centers for competitors, so it makes perfect sense for them to be secretive. They are secretive by default, and open when they reasonably believe they stand to benefit from it.

Google recently published a bunch of specs on their server fleet, touting energy efficiency. The designs were somewhat old, but certainly its not withholding information solely to keep data centers expensive.

If you was wondering about where Google keep the Gmail data, the answer is in this: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/669.html :)

So that's where my data is.