Microsoft to invest $700M into data center to power Xbox Live, Office 365

[Shawn Knight]

Microsoft is planning to invest nearly $700 million to expand a data center in Iowa that would be used to help power products like Xbox Live and Office 365. The expansion supports Microsoft’s growing demand for cloud services and serves...

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[Jad Chaar]

Wow they are betting a lot on the cloud.

 

[Lurker101]

If their marketing team keeping doing the bang up job it has been lately with the next gen products, that will be a well wasted $699,999,992

 

[MilwaukeeMike]

Yikes, so that's why they didn't want to back down from the XB1 'always connected' policy. They just bought a whole warehouse full of servers. I hope they're still within the buyer's remorse period.

 

[m4a4]

Better XBL in the near future? Sure, why not...

 

[gamoniac]

Yikes, so that's why they didn't want to back down from the XB1 'always connected' policy. They just bought a whole warehouse full of servers. I hope they're still within the buyer's remorse period.

Nah. DRM checking would not require 300,000 servers to run. Let's hope these servers will bring something exciting and useful.

 

[RH00D]

Yikes, so that's why they didn't want to back down from the XB1 'always connected' policy. They just bought a whole warehouse full of servers. I hope they're still within the buyer's remorse period.

Even if they didn't use them for Xbox Live services they could easily just re-purpose the whole datacenter for something else like Windows Azure or SkyDrive or Skype or Bing Search/Maps or projects that require mass computational power or anything else they do that can be powered by a server.

 

[supertech]

This is just the beginning of the cloud. Eventually your data will sit up there and you won't be stuck to any one device. No tech company can afford to sit still as they will get knocked off by someone doing it bigger and better.

 

[gamoniac]

Here is the best article about what Microsoft "cloud servers" can do to improve Xbox Live multiplayer experience, as explained by game developer Respawn's engineer, Jon Shiring -- http://www.respawn.com/news/lets-talk-about-the-xbox-live-cloud/