Microsoft has spent more than $15 billion, building out much more massive facilities that power its internet-based products such as Bing, Skype and Windows Azure



From Wired:

At Microsoft, the large-scale build-outs really started in 2006, when the software company began work on a 500,000-square-foot data center in Quincy, Washington. Up until that time, Building 11 aside, Microsoft had mostly rented space in large data-center co-location facilities. With Quincy, though, it designed everything from the ground up.

“Our footprint was growing significantly and we were in the height of the online services and web services shift,” says David Gauthier, Microsoft’s director of datacenter architecture & design management. “We realized, man we’re going to have to figure out how to build and design our own data centers.”

Since then, it’s built facilities in Chicago, Dublin, San Antonio, Texas, and Boydton, Virginia. And in a few months, it’s set to open a brand new $112 million facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. That’s where the company is also tinkering with a $5.5 million experiment called the Data Plant: It consists of a portable data center powered by methane harvested from the local sewage plant.

  Microsoft’s Data-Center Tab Tops $15 Billion