The billions in spending behind cloud data center growth

Data Center Knowledge's head infrastructure industry chronicler Yevgeniy Sverdlik turns in the following piece of analysis, looking into the billions of dollars now being spent on the rapid growth of cloud data centers:

"Every quarter, cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google collectively spend billions of dollars on servers and other hardware for their cloud services and data centers around the world to house all that gear, and the quarter that ended September 30 was no different."

"It’s difficult to distill the exact amounts companies spend on data centers. They are not required to disclose those numbers and usually lump them in with other capital expenditures. Cloud service providers do, however, consistently say that data center spend represents the biggest portion of their capital expenditures."

"Microsoft, for example, spent $1.5 billion in the last quarter to support demand growth for its cloud services, Amy Hood, the company’s CFO, said on the earnings call with analysts Thursday. Google’s capital expenditures for the quarter were about $2.4 billion, spent primarily on production equipment, data center construction, and facilities."

"On Amazon’s [most recent] earnings call, also on Thursday, Phil Hardin, director of investment relations at Amazon, said data center expenses that go into expanding or establishing cloud regions are 'really lumpy,' meaning it requires spending big sums in short periods of time to deploy new data center infrastructure to support the rapidly growing and highly profitable Amazon Web Services business."

Full story:The Billions in Data Center Spending Behind Cloud Revenue Growth (datacenterknowledge.com)