He sees Google building a portfolio of data centres and bandwidth... substantially under the radar of everyone who should be paying attention... all with an eye on video.
Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, which probably answers the land question posed above. By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station.
Of course this doesn't answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don't. I'll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That's perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?
Video is going to be the future. And the traditional media players are not far behind Google. And the TV station proprieters, the newspaper owners, even radio networks are all in the game too, along with the major telcos. This is a truly high stakes poker game. But I don't think that it will be fought in the US. I believe that the real game for all online media is China. Broadband is rolling out at an incredible rate. China is preparing to stun the world at the Beijing Olympics. They don't have legacy copper network issues to deal with - it is all mobile there....
