There were numerous reports yesterday that Facebook would build a huge new data center in Taiwan. The rumor boosted the shares of Wistron, which was reportedly in line to build hundreds of thousands of custom servers for Facebook's new facility. Other analyses suggested that Taiwan, which already is on tap to house a new Google data center, would become "the cloud-computing capital of the world."
There's just one problem. "We have no plans to build a data center in Taiwan," said Facebook spokesman Michael Kirkland.
Could there be another huge project in Taiwan? Perhaps. Whenever there's a large stealthy data center project, local chatter often attaches the project to the hot cloud builder of the moment. A few years ago, a number of projects were erroneously attributed to Google or Microsoft. Nowadays it's Facebook or Twitter.