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.
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