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Google Has Spent $21 Billion on Data Centers
- a3voices 13y agoI wonder how much money Google has spent per user. $10? $50?
- panacea 13y ago...and did they improve the fortunes of their advertising client base, or merely suck the wind out the prevailing sail without offering anything in return?
- fsckin 13y agoYou're thinking of Groupon.
- lsc 13y agoIt is a valid question. As a 'brand building' advertiser, I never felt like most of the google products delivered as much value as they claimed; they all seemed to be targeted at products people will buy after the first impression (which is... not, generally, how products in my sector are sold. People buy because they have heard of me. The 'hearing about me' is important, not the last click.) and the tracking mechanisms all seemed... naive. (now, that last part might just be the effect of them dumbing it down to the point where a small business owner, like me, can understand whats going on, but man... in that case, we advertisers trust google a lot.) Of course, I'm small, cynical, stupid, and don't spend much effort on advertising, so it's possible my impression is wrong.
- mrtksn 13y agoaccording to here: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are 2.5B internet users. since google is more than a search engine(android, gmail, adwords and so on) we can assume that most of these users somehow interact with google services, so just adding other expenses and deviding the number to 2.5 billion would give a quite accurate result.
- brd 13y agoGoogle hit a billion unique per month in May of 2011 and they've spent $21 billion in the last 7 years. Assuming no growth (which is absolutely not the case) they've spent an average of $3 per user per year.
- tunisian123 13y agogoogle doesn't throw her money away !! I'm positively sure that they will get it double a triple :) they don't do charity
- dudus 13y agoGoogle actually does a lot of charity http://www.google.com/giving/ http://www.google.com/giving/
- praptak 13y agoPublicly traded companies even if they do "charity", they do it expecting good PR in return. Any other kind of charity (i.e. done without publicity, only to make the world a better place) would be against their duty to the shareholders.
- prostoalex 13y agoDue to dual-class structure Google realistically has only two shareholders. The only legally mandated duty is quarterly report of the numbers.
- baddox 13y agoYou're just bringing up the tired thought experiment about whether "true altruism" exists. Is it really corporate "charity" if the company expects good PR and eventually profit as a result? Is it really individual "charity" if the person gets a really good feeling as a result?
- jrockway 13y agoIf real kids are getting real flu shots or whatever, who cares about the PR? Getting personal satisfaction from charitable giving doesn't make your donation less valuable. "You're only saving me from a life-threatening illness because you have a big ego! I don't want your charity," said no one ever.
- acchow 13y agoIs your point that we shouldn't be supportive of corporations doing charity? There are corporations which have rationally (long-term profit-wise, or whatever) decided to do charity work. There are corporations which have decided not to. I support the former.
- antidaily 13y agoSo they should use Hadoop?
- wikwocket 13y agoI'm not sure if you're posting sarcastically, but Hadoop was built based on whitepapers Google released about MapReduce and the Google File System. I think they are covered in this department!
- bpicolo 13y agoHe's definitely being sarcastic.
- DennisAleynikov 13y agoThey're posting in reference to [1] I believe. It's supposed to be a funny comment. They are pretty damn well covered in this department, I agree. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6398650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6398650
- znowi 13y agoHow much of it was subsidized by NSA? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs...
- jonknee 13y agoNearly nothing considering your article mentions "millions" for the whole program and Google has spent 21k million just on its own. Google makes more on interest from its cash on hand than it has received from the NSA.
- melling 13y agoIt's really disappointing that you're responding to what is the #1 comment. The NSA noise just overshadows much of the meaningful discussion on HN.
- DennisAleynikov 13y agoIt is quite disappointing. I'm personally very tired of how widespread and acceptable the conspiracy theories have become, everyone's wearing their tinfoil hats and running around screaming like the government's taking away their first born child. I can't say I care anymore. But that's like, my opinion man.
- domdip 13y agoHas anyone dug in and figured out how these #s are impacted by MMI?
- cobookman 13y agoMy question is if google spent 21 billion, why did microsoft spend > 15 billion on its datacenters. How much datacenter resources is each microsoft customer using? It can't be from just office 365, Azure, and Bing. So is the majority from just software updates/downloads?
- adamnemecek 13y agoDon't forget about Xbox Live and Skype data centers. I'm guessing that those might be contributing a nontrivial percentage.
- cobookman 13y agoAhh forgot about Xbox Live. I know they recently announced having 300,000 servers: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/microsoft-updates-xbox-live-/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/microsoft-updates-xbox-li... Mind you, 300,000 * 3k per server is still only 900 million.
- ImprovedSilence 13y agoYeah... but a datacenter is more than just servers right? You need a building, infrastructure (cooling, electric bill, efficient designing and engineering etc), development. These costs get big. fast.
- dekhn 13y agoI would guess they are trying to build up their cloud business. They have lots of cash, and they want a successful business. It's easy to justify a large buildout in that case, with the belief that the revenue will come. This is a common trap for innovators: you have to spend a lot just to stay in the game, while also preparing for the future. MSFT missed a lot of opportunities over the past few years due to their focus on Windows and Office (as Ballmer admitted recently) and now they have to play catchup.
- InTheSwiss 13y ago
- jcampbell1 13y agoDoes any one know the relative costs of hardware vs building and cooling? If I had a cool billion to spend, how much would I spend on building/cooling/power/generators vs servers and networking hardware?
- ihsw 13y agoPower failover and HVAC systems are on-going costs that usually exceed server hardware costs (both initial and replacement) by a long margin. Over a three-year period you'll probably get to spend 1% on actual server/networking hardware. I'm just pulling that number out of fat air, but you'll be spending far more on other things.
- lsc 13y ago>Power failover and HVAC systems are on-going costs that usually exceed server hardware costs (both initial and replacement) by a long margin. Over a three-year period you'll probably get to spend 1% on actual server/networking hardware. This is true... if you are running on 10 year old servers, and brand-new power/hvac equipment. On a more reasonable replacement schedule, if you pay what I pay for power/cooling/rack and what I pay for hardware, you are closer to half and half. Now, I pay a lot more than google does for both power and harware- but I suspect that the google discount on datacenter space is vastly greater than the google discount on hardware. If nothing else, california power is like 2x power anywhere else. Also, i'm strictly retail when it comes to datacenter space. I rent 23Kw usable from Coresite... meaning I'm renting like 28Kw capacity... so I'm not a single U customer, but I'm still firmly 'retail' You can alter this quite a bit just by going from X series to L series CPUs or by replacing your hardware more or less often. (I'm on L and E series xeons.) But, anyhow, from that? I'd think that google probably spends more on hardware than on power/cooling/etc...
- incision 13y agoHave a look at this [0][1], Chapter 6 should give you a some idea. 0: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35290.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35290.html 1: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdfplus/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y200905CAC006 http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdfplus/10.2200/S00193ED1V... [PDF]
- outside1234 13y agois that all? that's only $10k per machine if they have 2M machines (which I'd guess is a conservative estimate) NOTE: I'm not being snippy - that seems very efficient given the building, HVAC, networking, and the fact that they have probably had a lot of machines fail.
- ffrryuu 13y agoAnd I have spent tens of thousands on rent.
- pearjuice 13y agoThey do have 100% uptime, right?
- socillion 13y agoGoogle had a 5 minute outage this August, where global internet traffic dropped by 40%. http://www.fastcompany.com/3015942/most-innovative-companies-2013/a-brief-google-outage-made-total-internet-traffic-drop-by-40 http://www.fastcompany.com/3015942/most-innovative-companies...
- AznHisoka 13y agoWhat if you were trying to start Google today (assuming it didn't exist), and you had to bootstrap with maybe only $500 available to spent per month? How would you guys do it?
- kineticfocus 13y agoWell this would be a place to start... http://commoncrawl.org http://commoncrawl.org. It would be interesting to see a solution to the data center requirement that uses some adhoc bit-torrent like system.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoI presume you're talking about hardware budget. You probably wouldn't get very far with such a low budget, but I think your question is how to get the most bang for your buck. The answer is with dedicated hardware, especially for computationally expensive apps. $500/month dedicated hardware will beat the pants off of $500/month of EC2 instances for example, but it comes with the cost of being less flexible.
- hashtree 13y agoAmortized over 3/5 years or non-amortized? Different answers :)
- wmf 13y agoRead up on the history of DuckDuckGo; AFAIK it was one person in the beginning.
- nly 13y agoHold out with a handful of servers until Google bought you.
- alanlewis 13y agoHeadline is wrong. 2 data points that the article is based on: 1) Google has spent 21 billion dollars on Capital Expenditures since 2006 (presumably gathered from SEC filings) and 2) "Google says the majority of its capital investments are for IT infrastructure, including data enters, servers, and networking equipment." (source unclear) So, Google has spent at least 10.5 billion on "data centers" since 2006. There are notable disclosed expenditures that are clearly not "data centers" mentioned in the article, including 2 billion spent to purchase NYC office space. Still a huge number, but off by many, many billions.
- swashboon 13y agoDidn't they spend 2 billion buying the 111 Eighth Avenue office in Manhatten at the end of 2010? I believe that is data center realestate.
- rads 13y agoWhy would they put a data center in Manhattan? Don't these things usually go where the space is relatively cheap?
- warfangle 13y ago111 8th Ave was already a major carrier hotel (there are several on the Island). And it once _was_ cheap real-estate, before Chelsea became trendy and before it was renovated into one of the most high-tech office facilities on the island. As is, it has more usable square footage than the empire state building.
- nasalgoat 13y agoLatency. Putting things far away from your customers means response time goes up.
- _mulder_ 13y agoTrue, but populous though Manhattan is, it hardly warrants its own data center. If latency was their prime concern they would build the data center in the middle of the population density. For North East US, a location between NY and Washington DC would make more sense. It could be for transatlantic latency, but this would just be between the US and European data centers anyways. In short, no, I don't think latency would be a big deal here. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]