Taiwan Mobile said the company is investing NT$5 billion ($170 million) to build a green-energy cloud data center in Neihu district, a suburban area of Taipei.
The mobile operator plans to complete the construction of the data center and begin offering cloud computing services in the first quarter of 2013, Taiwan Mobile said in a statement.
The data center will provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to enterprises, which can lease hard disk drives, memory and internet bandwidth based on demand.
Meanwhile, rival Far EasTone is also building a data center – the ninth one of the operator - with investment of NT$6 billion in the same district, Taipei Timesreports.
Far EasTone had invested NT$10 billion building eight cloud-computing internet data centers in Taiwan.
The two operators’ move is in response to bigger rival Chunghwa Telecom’s recent announcement that it would deepen its collaboration with Intel to capitalize on new growth opportunities in the computer industry.
Several Taiwanese companies, including Quanta Computer and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, are moving into cloud computing, either by supplying servers or setting up their own data centers.
Moreover, Google last month said it would triple its investment in a cloud-computing data center in Changhua County to $300 million, from the $100 million it announced in September last year.
Google’s Taiwanese center, once its construction is completed early next year and it starts operations by the end of next year, would be the largest of its kind in Asia, with two other centers currently under construction in Hong Kong and Singapore.
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