Gates: We'll Have 'Many Millions' of Servers

In his keynote this morning at TechEd 2008, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates spoke about Microsoft's data center growth, predicting that the company will soon have "many millions of servers" to power its online services. Gates described Microsoft's "mega data centers" as providing an advantage in the current cloud-building arms race, saying that "Microsoft and only a few others" will be able to build these facilities.

The shift of services to the cloud "is getting us to think about data centers on a scale we never have before," said Gates. "Today in our data centers we have literally hundreds of thousands of servers. In the future, we'll have many millions of those servers."

Gates comments about Microsoft's data center operations were part of a much longer keynote presentation to more than 5,000 developers at Microsoft's TechEd North America 2008 Developers conference in Orlando, Florida.

The Microsoft chairman said the larger scale of the company's new data centers provides the opportunity for innovation. "When you think about design, you can be very radical and come up with some huge improvements as you design for this kind of scale," Gates said.

Here's some of our recent coverage of Microsoft (MSFT) and its data center projects and innovations: