The wealth manager to Facebook Inc founder Mark Zuckerberg and other technology entrepreneurs is starting a unit to invest in data centers to profit from growing demand for cloud-based services.
Iconiq Capital, run by Divesh Makan, registered a new subsidiary with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last month that is to put funds into technology-related real estate, according to documents filed with the agency.
Facebook and other technology giants have already spent billions of US dollars building data centers to provide cloud-based computer services to individual customers, Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Anand Srinivasan said.
That spending pales in comparison with the amount of funding that would be required as global corporations turn to the cloud to meet their computing needs.
“We are just scratching the surface on the large data center expansion trend,” Srinivasan said.
Iconiq, in starting a fund to invest in data centers, “has definitely picked up on a trend,” he said.
The demand for additional capacity has already fueled a surge in the market value of publicly traded tech companies and real-estate investment trusts (REITs) that own and operate data centers.
“The public REITs in the data-center space have been the best-performing sector of stocks in the past eight months,” said Jerald Kent, chairman of TierPoint, a closely held provider of cloud-computing services.
Iconiq opened in 2011, the year before Facebook held its US$16 billion initial public offering.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day