Google May Open Data Center in Taiwan

Taipei, Jan. 30, 2008 (CENS)--Search engine Google is considering to open data centers overseas as part of an aggressive Internet-service project codenamed "Cloud Computing" in association with IBM and Taiwan along with other locations are under considerations.

Taiwanese industry watchers noted that once the world's No.1 search engine chooses Taiwan as the location for the center, the plan will bring Taiwan lucrative business opportunities worth of billions of NT dollars.

An overseas data center can serve as a backup to the company's United States center, according to people familiar with Google's plan.

Although Google is operating a data center in Taiwan, the center is housed in an Acer data facility in Taoyuan County, northern Taiwan. Considering that data will grow immensely in the future, the search engine may open an in-house data center in Taiwan.

In response to media reports of the Taiwan center plan, Google's executives said the company will not comment on any speculation about any of its plans and the company will not offer information on any specific location for the planned centers.

Google Vice President and President for the greater Chinese region K.F. Lee said his company is aggressively pushing the "Cloud Computing" plan in cooperation with academic institutions in consideration that computing and data storing will be completed on the Internet. In a word, all computing will not be necessarily conducted in personal computers but on the Internet.

Lee stressed Google has mostly heeded the development of the plan recently and it is unimportant where the location will be.

Google is operating a data center each in North Carolina State, Southern California, and Washington State. The Southern California center alone cost the company at least US$600 million to complete. Its Washington center is built on a site equal to two football fields. Severs in the company's data centers are mostly made by Taiwanese manufacturers including Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. and Microstar International Co., Ltd.

Taiwanese industry watchers pointed out once Google decides to open the center in Taiwan, it will spend at least NT$10 billion (US$312 million at US$1:NT$32) on equipment including servers.

Taiwan government is striving to convince Google to open the facility in Taiwan.