Google's 2013 data center spending nears $3B

July 21, 2013 | By Dan O'Shea

While Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) second quarter earnings report last week for the most part disappointed Wall Street, details of the Internet giant's spending on its data center footprint may have given chills to other data center operators. According to the earnings report, Google spent $1.6 billion in the second quarter alone on its rapidly expanding data center footprint.

This outlay comes after Google invested about $1.2 billion in its data centers in the first quarter of 2013. With $2.8 billion put into its data centers through the first half of the year, the company is on pace to spend more on its data centers in 2013 than in any previous year. That is impressive, considering it invested $3.43 billion in data center buildouts in 2011, and then roughly $3.45 billion in 2012.

In the last two years or so, the data center market has been growing beyond anyone's wildest expectations, as telcos have joined Internet giants like Google, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), as well as other independent data center operators and wholesale telecom providers. Some telcos have bought their way into the market, but after getting a glimpse at Google's billion dollars-plus expense every quarter, they may gain some new perspective on where they rank in the data center world.