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Software companies are building their way to a very material future
2007-06-30
At dozens of sites around the world today, construction crews are erecting vast, windowless buildings, each designed to hold thousands of computers. Connected to the internet through thick bundles of fibre-optic cables, these data centres, or server farms, promise to be the power plants of the information age - and to usher in a new era in the software business. Google has been the leader in the building boom as it strives to keep up with the booming demand for its search engine and other web services. The company already operates scores of data centres around the globe, reportedly holding as many as 2m or 3m computers altogether, and it continues to spend billions of dollars a year to put up new ones. It has centres under construction in Oregon, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma and the Dutch port city of Eemshaven, and last week announced plans for a $600m (£300m) facility in Iowa But Google is far from the only computing company laying lots of bricks and mortar. Its arch-rival, Microsoft, is building a mammoth data centre on a former bean field in the farming town of Quincy, Washington. It expects that the site will ultimately hold six warehouse-sized buildings encompassing 140,000 sq m of computer-packed space. Also rushing to build or lease data centres are Yahoo!, Ask.com, Intuit, Salesforce.com and Deutsche Telekom's T-Systems unit, among many others. What's behind this land grab? It stems from a change in the nature of the software business. In the past, software companies only had to concern themselves with writing code, copying their programs on to di