> new data centres will all be self funded by the company who has said that it will be able to pay for these though its current cash on hand and current revenue

> new data centres will all be self funded by the company who has said that it will be able to pay for these though its current cash on hand and current revenues. If they really don't take any loans to build 12 data centers at once, that's really impressive. Or does that only mean "without taking investments"? Let's say it takes 40M USD to build and stock a data center, built over the course of 3 years, that would be an extra drain of 120M USD per year. Of course there is huge variabilty here: if they don't start from the green field, but buy/rent/lease existing buildings, they can go to market much faster. And it all depends on the size of the new centers, which hardware they stock it with etc. UPDATE: Just found http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-part-2/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-pa... which claims that some Google data centers cost USD 600M each, so it seems there's not much of an upper limit, and/or my estimates were hopelessly low.