Intel: Mega data centers sucking up chips

Jason Waxman, Intel’s general manager of high-density servers, told The Register that in the next few years, about one-quarter of all chip sales will go to so-called “mega data centers.”

Currently, that number is at about 10%, but Waxman predicts it growing as “the world continues to embrace distributed grid cloud architectures from the net’s biggest names,” according to the story.

It’s important to note what Waxman considers a “mega data center:” Google, Amazon, Microsoft, “but also telcos doing hosting like AT&T and Verizon.” He further defined it as companies purchasing thousands of machines a month and putting them into megawatt data centers.

As the story points out, this growth only occurs if cloud computing takes hold and grows. Currently Google and Microsoft have put the brakes on data center construction, for data centers largely thought to be cloud computing-based.