Google Super-Sizing Its Data Centers?

In his recent interview in Wired, Google CEO Eric Schmidt makes an extraordinary statement about the company's data centers. Wired interviewer Fred Vogelstein asks Schmidt how many data centers Google operates. Schmidt's reponse:

"The very large ones will be the small ones." Think about that for a moment. The best known of the new generation of mega-centers is Google's data center in The Dalles, Oregon, which was featured on the front page of the New York Times. Let's use that as a starting point for exploring how Google is scaling its data center ambitions.

Land acquisition is perhaps an imperfect metric for analyzing these projects (more on this in a moment), but the progression is mighty interesting:

Check out the progression: 30 acres, then 220 acres, then 520 acres and now 800 acres. There are several explanations for why Google is buying such large amounts of real estate. The company is notoriously secretive about its data centers, and may want a "buffer zone" to make them harder to see and photograph from public roads. Some have theorized that the larger footprints are all about power capacity, with Google buying adjacent land that might otherwise be developed and leased to companies that would compete with Google for electricity.

But Schmidt's comment to Wired suggests that the obvious conclusion is also the correct one: Google is buying larger tracts of land to accommodate much larger data centers, facilities that will make the celebrity data center at The Dalles look small by comparison.