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> You are right, the capital cost of millions of servers worldwide, with security guards, and buildings, and cooling is zero. Not even close to the capital cos
by iateanapple 6y ago
> You are right, the capital cost of millions of servers worldwide, with security guards, and buildings, and cooling is zero.
Not even close to the capital costs and margins of an airline.
Compare AWS margins and capital costs with Amazons retail margins and capital costs for example.
- joshuamorton 6y agoThe capital costs might actually be similar (or higher for AWS). The margins, of course, are much lower for an airline. The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019, which is about the same as the purchase cost of all 130 of Delta Airlines' 737-900ER aircraft (which is about 1/6 of Delta's entire fleet).
- iateanapple 6y ago> The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019 It’s hard to do a fair comparison like this between high growth companies and normal companies - for example what fraction of that cost for Google is growth based vs to maintain exisiting services?