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The Coming of the Megacomputer

March 9, 2009
by Nicholas Carr
Blogger, Rough Type

Nicholas Carr

Here’s an incredible, and telling, data point. In a talk yesterday, reports the Financial Times Richard Waters, the head of Microsoft Research, Rick Rashid, said that about 20 percent of all the server computers being sold in the world “are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies,” including Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN).

Recently, total world-wide server sales have been running at around eight million units a year. That means that the cloud giants are gobbling up more than a million and a half servers annually. (What’s not clear is how Google fits into these numbers, since last I heard it was assembling its own servers rather than buying finished units.)

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