Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦), the world’s No. 5 PC vendor and the No. 1 motherboard maker, plans to set up three more data centers worldwide by early next year, with the aim of providing better services to users of cloud computing services, the company’s cloud services subsidiary said on Thursday.
Asustek has three data centers, in Los Angeles, Taipei and Shanghai, which provide services to 10 million users worldwide, said Andy Huang (黃世民), a director at Asus Cloud Corp (華碩雲端).
To meet its users’ growing demand for cloud services, the company has decided to set up three more centers, one in the eastern US, one in Europe and one in northern China, he said at a cloud computing forum in Taipei.
MORE USERS, FILES
Over the past two years, both the number of users and files stored in the Asus cloud have increased “substantially,” Huang told the Central News Agency on the sidelines of the two-day forum, adding that the new data centers would provide a better a service to the firm’s users.
Established in 2008, Asus Cloud is eyeing a big slice of the cloud computing pie, he said.
The cloud portion of Asustek’s services may break even by the end of this year and it is expected to see revenues grow over the next two to three years, Huang added.
LOCATIONS
Huang said the locations the company is considering for its new centers are Tianjin, Harbin and Chongqing in China; Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland in Europe; and Boston in the US.
However, he declined to provide further details, saying only that the project is still in the negotiation stage.
Currently, the company is working with six local universities to develop multiple services with the aim of commercializing the cloud experience in the Asia-Pacific region, Huang said.
Taiwan announced in 2010 that it would invest NT$24 billion (US$804 million) over five years in the cloud computing sector, with the aim of creating a billion dollar industry.
The nation’s cloud service market is projected to double from NT$7.5 billion to NT$15 billion by 2015, according to the government-funded Industrial Economics and Knowledge Research Center.
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