Hyderabad: Social networking site Facebook is all set to launch its India operations from Hyderabad in less than two months.

The company’s proposal to set up a unit in Raheja Mindspace SEZ here was approved by the Union Government on Saturday, said a senior official of the state Information Technology Department on Sunday.

“The company is aggressively hiring people. Initially, they will be operating from an incubation centre in the SEZ,” the official told PTI.

Facebook’s new operations centre in Hyderabad will supplement operations supported out of Palo Alto, California, Dublin, Ireland, and a recently-announced location in Austin, Texas. The Hyderabad office will be Facebook’s first office in the Asian region.

As many as five IT companies have been accorded permission to set up their offices in a total area of 3.91 lakh sq ft in different IT SEZs across the state. The other prominent MNC IT companies include Accenture and Invesco (Expansion).

The official said that Facebook has been allotted about 50,000 sq ft space and is going to recruit close to 500 people for running its operations.

Facebook, which has nearly 8 million subscribers in India, would reportedly invest $150 million in the initial phases. It has more than 400 million active users worldwide.

Facebook had recently announced that it would invest in India by opening an office in Hyderabad, where it is expected to build a world-class team to support a growing number of users, advertisers and developers from India and across the world.