Google chucks $757m at data center empire

Google's capital expenditures – the amount of money forked into its worldwide network of data centers – reached $757m in the third quarter, their highest level since early 2008, when the company was erecting at least three new data center facilities in the US.

In fact, the first quarter of 2008 was the only quarter in the company's history when it spent more on its data centers – $842m – than in three months ending September 30. We know that the company is currently building a new data center in Finland – a newspaper destruction metaphor sitting on the site of an abandoned paper mill – but there are presumably other new projects underway as well.

Google did not immediately respond to an inquiry seeking an explanation for the steep rise in spending. The company likes to keep quiet about the location and design of data centers. In April 2009, the company at longlast lifted the curtain on its famously modular data center design – but it only showed bits and pieces of its very first modular facility, which had been built four years earlier.

The epic ad broker now owns at least 37 data centers across the globe, including the unfinished facility in Hamina, Finland. But over the past three years, the Finland facility was the only new data center revealed to the public. In the summer of 2007, Google announced it was building a trio of new data centers in the US – in Goose Creek, South Carolina; Pryor, Oklahoma; and Council Bluffs, Iowa – and its spending reached unprecedented levels in the first quarter of the next year. But then the bottom fell out of the US economy.

The company went from spending $842m in the first quarter of 2008 to a mere $139m in the second quarter of 2009, and along the way, it delayed construction of the Oklahoma facility. Spending has slowly increased since the middle of 2009, but it took a rather large leap during this last quarter, jumping 60 per cent, from $476m to $757m.

Most likely, the Finland data center is responsible for some of the increase – the facility is slated to cost $260m, including the $52m purchase of the paper mill – but this can't account for it all.

Data Center Knowledge has a nice graph showing the ups and downs of Google's capital expenditures.

Mountain View has said that in order to roll out Google Instant – a new version of its search engine that serves up results pages as you type – it increased the capacity of its back-end. But it also downplayed the extent of this extra capacity, putting more emphasis on its efforts to designed Google Instant in a way that minimizes the need for added servers.

"One solution would have been to simply invest in a tremendous increase in server capacity, but we wanted to find smarter ways to solve the problem," reads a blog post from distinguished engineer Ben Gomes. "We did increase our back-end capacity, but we also pursued a variety of strategies to efficiently address the incredible demand from Google Instant."

During the press event in San Francisco announcing the service, one engineer said that the Google Instant servers keep track of what data the browser already has and what data is already being gathered by other servers and that for the roll-out of the service, the company had improved its caching system. At one point, Gomes indicated the new caching system is related to to Google Caffeine, the new search index software infrastructure that rolled out across the company's data centers earlier this year.

Eventually, Google plans to expand its network across "100s to 1000s" of locations around the world. So, if it hasn't started data center number 38, it will. ®