Tech giant Intel announced on Thursday that it plans to partner with Taiwan to establish a research center on cloud computing, which is expected to solidify the island's status as a key innovator for the global IT industry.

Valuing Taiwan's advantages in hardware manufacturing, Intel announced a major move to cooperate the local industry, government officials, and the academic community on a joint cloud computing plan.

It showed commitment and support for the Ministry of Economic Affairs assessment and Chunghwa Telecom's promotion of industry standards as well as a joint venture with the National Science Council clan to spend 750 million NT$ over 5 years.

This will be for a laboratory and employee traininng. However, the 2008 WIMAX agreement was suddenly cut off this year as Intel dismissed the research deparment. This has led the MOEA to be more conservative in its response to this new agreement.

Intel had promised strong support of Taiwan's investment in WIMAX.

President Ma Ying-jeou had also pledged that all MRTs would have high speed wimax networks.

After two years, with Intel's president returning to Taiwna, President Ma was able to express his concerns to him face to face.

While Intel said that it will continue to support the WIMAX technology and affirmed Taiwan's performance in this area, Intel President Paul Otellini did not give a clear direction for the future development of WIMAX.

Intel also took the opportunity to clarify that dissolving the WIMAX research department was due to the fact that wimax technology is maturing.

It emphasized the process of bilateral cooperation, which included some room for improvement.

However, all promises have been kept.

They hoped that the the new focus coud be placed on cooperation in the area of cloud computing to create more future business opportunities.