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Google plots server farm land grab in Europe

Goolge Plots Server Farm Land Grab in Europe
Written by Donna Bogatin, Contributor

Google demands more tax breaks for server farm rule and Google pressures power companies for data center exemptions.

BUT, that is just in the United States, the corporate home base of Google, Inc.

The Google "mission," though, is a global one: "Organize the WORLD'S information." Naturally then, the Google "base" must be a global one.

Yesterday, I reported on Google's growing data center ambitions for server farm rule in North Carolina, Iowa, Oklahoma...Google is no xenophobe, though.

In proudly reporting Google's Q1 2007 earnings, Google CEO Eric Schmidt underscored:  "We continued to expand our worldwide footprint."

Where will those global footprints be seen next? Belgium, "anti" Google News, lawsuit eager Belgian press be damned!

Why Belgium? Its tourist-friendly canals are Google data center friendly as well. How so? Google power throws off a lot of heat (pun intended). The cooling Belgian waters to the Google rescue. Existing fiber optic infrastructure doesn't hurt either.

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Google will invest 250 million euros in a new data center to "bring Google a few milliseconds closer to European users."

Schmidt on number of data centers Google operates worldwide now, and future plans:

I think my overall description would be in the dozens. There are a few very large ones, some of which have been leaked to the press. But in a year or two the very large ones will be the small ones because the growth rate is such that we keep building even larger ones, and that's where a lot of the capital spending in the company is going.

Georges Reyes, CFO, on data center investments: 

Capital expenditures for the Q1 2007 quarter totaled $597 million. While there were some real estate-related expenditures as in prior quarters, the majority of our CapEx was related to IT infrastructure investments, including data centers, servers and networking equipment. As we have discussed previously, we expect to make continued significant capital expenditure investments to drive the growth of our business as these investments have contributed tremendously to our success to date.

How so? Schmidt:

We are also way, way investing in engineering because we believe this is a time where our model is scaling that products that we are going to bring out in a year or two are going to have huge impacts to the investments we're making in data centers, and we need the engineers to build the great products to do so.

Google also needs engineering manpower to manage its "massively, scalable infrastructure."

Now that Google has calmed the political waters around its North Carolina server farm build-out, it is building out its people power there:

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SEE: Google surprise? Google strong-arms government officials and
Google defends $165 million ‘few strings attached’ tax breaks and
Google gets defensive, all over the world

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