Facebook yesterday denied a news report that it planned to establish a cloud-computing data center at a science park in Taiwan.
“We have no plans to build a data center in Taiwan,” Dow Jones Newswires yesterday quoted Facebook spokesman Michael Kirkland as saying.
Facebook’s denial came after the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported on Tuesday that the world’s largest social networking site was considering setting up a data center at the Central Taiwan Science Park and that it would be its biggest cloud-computing data center in Asia.
The report, which did not indicate the source of the information, said the planned data center in Taiwan would occupy an area of more than 20,000 ping (66,116m2).
The project could bring in billions of NT dollars in business to the nation’s major server manufacturers, such as Wistron Corp (緯創), Gigabyte Technology Co (技嘉) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), the newspaper said, adding that the server deals would close by January.
The report was “not accurate,” Kirkland was quoted as saying by Dow Jones.
Last month, Facebook announced that it would build its first data center outside the US in Lulea, Sweden, to cope with the rapid rise in global demand. There are now 800 million active users worldwide, according to Facebook’s own statistics.
In other news, MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the nation’s biggest handset chip designer, said on Tuesday it had teamed up with Facebook to embed the social network into MediaTek’s mobile platform solutions.
“This partnership will allow users of handsets powered by MediaTek’s Runtime Environment (MRE) to better connect with their friends, family and coworkers,” MediaTek said in a statement.
In June, MediaTek forged a similar partnership with Yahoo Inc to embed the US Internet company’s services — including Yahoo messenger, news, finance, weather, mail and Flickr — into MediaTek’s MRE mobile platform solution.
MediaTek said the MRE solution is designed for mobile developers and application providers to deploy services and content for feature phones, allowing users in emerging markets to enjoy rich online experiences previously available only on smartphones.
According to a recent study by Informa Media and Telecom research group, emerging markets will account for 60 percent of the mobile market by 2013.
With 70 percent of mobile handsets sold in emerging markets being feature phones, MediaTek said MRE-enabled devices would enable many users in emerging markets to access Facebook for the first time.
The company is currently working with leading handset brands, including Spice Group and Micromax in India, Cherry Mobile in the Philippines and Nexian in Indonesia, to roll out their mobile solutions in these key markets.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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