In President Ma Ying-jeou’s meeting with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, the president welcomed Google’s decision to set up a data center in Changhua County, Taiwan. The president saw Google’s decision as a vote of confidence for his efforts to make Taiwan a global innovation center, serving as an economic hub for Taiwanese and international businesses.
Google has built close relations with Taiwan’s hi-tech sector, with its operating systems being widely adopted in HTC smart phones and ASUS tablet PCs. The Taipei-based China Times reported that President Ma expressed the hope that, in addition to the data center, Google will establish additional close links with Taiwan’s industry, such as expanding the breadth of cooperation in generating software, system services, green energy products and even helping Taiwan to develop more creative talent in the promotion of the Android platform used in smart phones and Chrome in computer operating systems.
President Ma said the government plans to work with international companies to strengthen Taiwan’s research and development capabilities to further promote the island as the Asia-Pacific information logistics center in B2C e-business models and to enhance the inter-enterprise supply chain B2B e-business models.
Arriving in Taiwan on November 9, Schmidt’s whirlwind visit included meeting the management teams of Acer, Asus, Foxconn, MediaTek, Quanta, HTC, Chunghwa Telecom and other groups. He conveyed Google’s intention to continue to work with such world-class manufacturers to enlarge the overall business pie.
The Economic Daily News reported that, in addition to Google, Facebook will also open large data centers in Taiwan. These new facilities will not only bring hundreds of thousands dollars in procurement opportunities to the island, but will also spur on the rise of the information logistics industry to the tune of tens of billion of dollars.
This year the Ministry of Economic Affairs launched the “Asia-Pacific Information logistics center plan” which aims to encourage foreign companies to establish large-scale enterprise data centers in Taiwan. Having two such notable companies as Google and Facebook in Taiwan will only serve to attract other international companies to follow suit. With the resulting cluster effect, Taiwan could well be on its way to being the world’s leading cloud computing center.