CHUNGHWA TELECOM CONSIDERS RAISING FUNDING FOR NEW CLOUD COMPUTING DATA CENTRE

Chunghwa Telecom Co, the incumbent operator in Taiwan, is considering raising capital spending in 2010 to fund the construction of a new cloud computing data centre. Chunghwa’s president, Chang Shaio-tung is reported to have advised investors that the company would evaluate the possibility of increasing this year’s capital spending by 10 percent from the NT$32.6 billion originally estimated to support the build. The new facility will be the company’s second cloud computing data centre, located in Changhua County, and would bring the company’s investment in cloud computing data centres to NT$59 billion . In the first six months, ­Chunghwa Telecom made NT$24.99 billion in net profit, up 12.3 percent from NT$22.26 billion during the same period last year. Revenue rose 2.2 percent year-on-year to NT$99.28 billion from NT$97.18 billion. Chunghwa has previously announced an investment of NT$ 10 billion (USD 312 million) over a period of three years to build a new data centre equipped with cloud computing technology. This centre will be constructed on a 26,000 sqm site in Taipei County and it is expected to be ready in 2013 with an estimated area 60,000 sqm for servers.

A recent report by BroadGroup revealed that Taiwan would own approximately 40% of total data centre space across the Greater China markets by the end of 2011 (Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Taiwan).