While the government of Taiwan is officially encouraging both local and foreign companies to open datacenters on their island, J.T Wang, the chairman of Acer, Inc came out against the idea, citing many of the negative aspects of datacenter construction, according to a report from Focus Taiwan.
Perhaps motivated by Google’s announcement late last year that they were planning to acquire almost 40 acres of land and invest $100 million in a new datacenter in order to improve the availability and performance of their services in that part of the world, Taiwan’s official position, according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Industrial Development Bureau, is that datacenters will offer an opportunity to grow talent, investment, and R&D in information technology.
Wang’s position is that datacenter’s themselves require significant local resources just to support their operations and that the country would be better served by developing the intellectual capital that can utilize the cloud. He has been quoted as saying that it was more important to develop the cloud-based applications that would meet people’s daily needs.
The government position is that datacenter operators will need to prove that their facilities bring benefit to the country and that all of the supporting infrastructure issues must be addressed prior to construction.
Mr. Wang’s comments should definitely be taken to heart by places looking to attract datacenter projects. While the resources of an island nation are more clearly impacted by the significant power needs of large datacenters the long term effects of such projects should be considered regardless of location. Simply investing in datacenters and their infrastructure doesn’t guarantee that other technology business will decide to move to the same location.
The point is a good one; while datacenters are a requirement to bring cloud services to the user it is the applications that will have the greatest impact on the end user’s life.
