14 DAY TRIAL // On the Oregon-Washington border, in the agricultural landscape ,130 km east of Portland, Google has widened the gap that separates it from the main competitors: Microsoft and Yahoo over the domination of Internet computing. After recently building a kindred complex in Atlanta, a new data center will be added to Googleplex's worldwide computing system. At over 150 km to the north, Microsoft and Yahoo announced the construction of similar data centers, but the positions reserved from the two in their race with Google can only be second and third.
Google's data center is as big as two football fields, its cooling plants raising four stories into the sky, its construction site employing hundreds of workers and catapulting the real estate prices up 40% are all reasons why the secret Project 02 is not so secret any more.
Google's computing system has grown over the years from 8.000 in 2001 when it was serving 70 million web pages daily, to an approximated 100.000 in 2003. The rate at which it has grown results in an estimated 450.000 servers in Googleplex's 25 worldwide locations connected by a high-capacity fiber-optic network. Microsoft's similar network is only half the size of Google's.
As a result Microsoft announced 2007 investments that will run up to two billion dollars in an effort to keep up with Google. The Mountain View Company stated that its own investment capital will be an estimated 1.5 billion dollars.