Cloud Computing: Web giants splash out on servers again
May 3, 2016
Grazed from BDLive. Author: Shira Ovide.
THE web’s biggest spenders have mostly started splurging again. I wrote six months ago that Google, Microsoft and Amazon — among the world’s biggest operators of internet technologies and cloud-computing services — had slowed or reversed their perky growth in spending on huge server farms and other capital projects. I did not expect the breather to last — and for the most part, it has not.
Collectively, capital spending by those three giants and Facebook has risen 23% this year after a collective decline of 0.9% last year. Only Google’s parent company Alphabet has bucked the capex-growth rebound. Buying and maintaining their gigantic computing networks represent a big chunk of the tech superpowers’ overall bill…
It costs a tonne to run seven web services with at least a billion monthly users, as Google does, or to power other companies’ computer networks, as Amazon Web Services does. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook spent a combined $23bn on capital projects last year. During an investment flurry from 2011 to last year, the companies’ combined capex nearly tripled…
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