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.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
RSS