As a member benefit of the Developer Force community, you can get first access to developer previews and special programs.  Starting yesterday evening, if you are from one of the 59 countries in the Asia-Pacific region (with the exception of Japan) and sign up for a free Developer Edition environment (aka organization), you will be provisioned an environment on our new APAC data center located in Singapore! 

Because of the proximity to the Asia-Pacific region, users in this region will get the best possible performance and network response time. This new data center was developed to the same industry-leading quality and service delivery specification as our facilities located in the U.S. Additionally, it benefits from being on our next-generation database clustering technology.

If you are from this region, you have to sign up for a new account to get hosted on the new data center, even if you have an existing Developer Edition environment.  Sign up at http://developer.force.com/join.  Share the good news with your partners and peers!

Once you get your new environment and log in, you will notice ap1.salesforce.com in the browser URL.

Paying customers (i.e. production orgs) will be phased in after the Summer '09 release later this year.

If you have any feedback on the new data center, simply reply to this discussion board thread.