A recent NYT
article reports that Google is estimated to have 450,000 servers in 25 locations. What is interesting about this is that all the competitors in the search space have started to make heavy investments in physical facilities and IT. MSFT is spending $2 billion and Google is spending $1.5 billion. This spending on infrastructure creates a huge barrier to entry. In addition, these companies are accumulating behavioral data within these data centers that creates additional barriers.