Apple plans data center in Taiwan as cloud services push ramps up

While EU nations may not get to use Apple Intelligence for a while, Apple is preparing for more users on its cloud services elsewhere across the planet, including in Taiwan.

What Apple is doing

Apple is following other big tech firms to plan construction of a data center in Taiwan. Local reports claim the company has begun discussing the plans with manufacturing partners, likely including Foxconn, which happens to be the world’s biggest AI server manufacturer. Given Apple now makes its own iCloud Secure servers based around a highly proprietary design, Foxconn may derive plenty of benefit as Apple seeks to build the kind of AI infrastructure you need to handle over a billion potential AI users.

Brave new online world

A Taiwan News report observes that Google, Amazon AWS, Microsoft and Nvidia are also setting up data centers in Taiwan. The other side of these investments is that the big tech firms are engaged in a shopping spree for green energy to power these new data hubs. Apple has trebled the amount of renewable electricity used across its supply chain, and I don’t see it making an exception for data centers.

This of course implies rapid future investment in additional renewable energy capacity, conceivably including Apple investments under (for example) its Power for Impact program, which provides under-resourced communities with access to renewable energy.

If Apple does plan an investment, in terms of the economic benefits to Taiwan, UDN estimates the combination of AI servers, green energy, and hardware could bring $3 billion into Taiwan.

What (might) come next?

My personal speculation is that it also seems highly probably the data center will be used to power Apple’s cloud services across much of the region. I fully anticipate Apple will continue to strategically roll out new data centers globally to support its next generation cloud services, even as it works to expand those it has already put in place.

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