The rumor that Google might build a data center in Australia has been circulating for some time; our first report on the subject was written in October of 2008.  Now, although construction crews haven't exactly been mobilized, there's at least been a sign that Google hasn't given up on the idea.

Deepak Ramanathan, the head of Google's enterprise marketing arm in the Asia-Pacific region, recently spoke at an event in Sydney.  Renai LeMay reported that people representing several Australian corporations expressed an interest in Google Apps while there.

Then here's the more interesting part: according to LeMay, Ramanathan responded by saying that "the search giant was not ruling out an Australian datacentre for services like Gmail, and that discussions were ongoing."

The last time we talked about Google building a data center in Australia (April of last year), the main stumbling block seemed to be the economy.  Obviously, it's gotten better (Google's stock, for example, is up about 45 percent since then).

So as more and more Australian organizations go to Google for different services, we may finally reach the tipping point at which the company will see fit to build a data center in that country.