Space Elevators

After recently receiving a non-ironic lecture on Twitter that CAPEX investment is the best tell for cloud competitiveness, I’m starting to think Follow the CAPEX™ is building a following. Beyond the circular wisdom of Twitter, awareness is growing of the importance of CAPEX as both a leading indicator of the ability to compete at hyper-scale…

In our last installment of Follow the CAPEX™ (motion picture rights are still available), we looked at the gargantuan CAPEX spending by the three hyper-scale public cloud companies: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. That previous post compiled CAPEX spending for the cloud leaders back to 2001 and let us speculate about when they got serious about…

The capital expenditures (CAPEX) going into the cloud are Sagan-esque, with billions upon billions being spent on sprawling complexes of interconnected datacenters scattered across the planet. The hyper-scale public cloud operators (Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft) operate BFGCs (big, uh, freakin’ global computers) at immense industrial scale, with townships of well-ventilated warehouses that collectively hold…