Headline is wrong. 2 data points that the article is based on: 1) Google has spent 21 billion dollars on Capital Expenditures since 2006 (presumably gathered from SEC filings) and 2) "Google says the majority of its capital investments are for IT infrastructure, including data enters, servers, and networking equipment." (source unclear)<p>So, Google has spent at least 10.5 billion on "data centers" since 2006. There are notable disclosed expenditures that are clearly not "data centers" mentioned in the article, including 2 billion spent to purchase NYC office space. Still a huge number, but off by many, many billions.
My question is if google spent 21 billion, why did microsoft spend > 15 billion on its datacenters. How much datacenter resources is each microsoft customer using? It can't be from just office 365, Azure, and Bing. So is the majority from just software updates/downloads?
Does any one know the relative costs of hardware vs building and cooling? If I had a cool billion to spend, how much would I spend on building/cooling/power/generators vs servers and networking hardware?
What if you were trying to start Google today (assuming it didn't exist), and you had to bootstrap with maybe only $500 available to spent per month? How would you guys do it?
is that all? that's only $10k per machine if they have 2M machines (which I'd guess is a conservative estimate)<p>NOTE: I'm not being snippy - that seems very efficient given the building, HVAC, networking, and the fact that they have probably had a lot of machines fail.
How much of it was subsidized by NSA?<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs...</a>