Tawian-based notebook ODMs Quanta Computer and Wistron have won white-box server orders from Baidu, the largest search engine in China, through cooperation with China-based partners, with small-volume shipments having already begun in September 2012 and large-volume shipments to start in late December and first-quarter 2013, according to the Chinese-language newspaper Commercial Times (CT).

Quanta and Wistron have landed the orders through their respective wholly-own subsidiaries QCT and Wiwynn, both of which are members of the Open Compute Project (OPC), a program initiated by Facebook in 2011 to promote design of open-source servers and data center architecture, and therefore are able to directly supply hardware to OPC members including Baidu, CT said. Baidu is setting up a cloud computing data center in northern China with planned 4-year investment of CYN4.708 billion (US$754 million), CT indicted.

Quanta and Wistron havealso obtained white-box server orders from Microsoft, with these servers to be designed by Microsoft, CT said.