How many servers does Google have? Nobody outside Google knows exactly how many servers the company has, but there have been a number of estimates through the years. One of the most quoted ones is from 2006, when it was estimated that Google had approximately 450,000 servers. And that was three years ago.
Another estimate showed up in 2007, this time from the analyst firm Gartner, estimating the number of Google servers to one million.
Considering that both these estimates are from a long time ago and Google has grown its data centers significantly since then, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Google today has at least one million servers worldwide (in more than 30 data centers). This may even be a conservative estimate, but let’s settle for that number and not get too carried away.
Google’s portion of the world’s server pool
So if Google has a million servers, how does this relate to the total number of servers in the world? There are recent estimates that put the total number of servers in the world to 44 million.
If these numbers are correct, that would mean that Google owns more than 2% of all servers in the world.
Google is all about the Internet, but that’s still a pretty big number for any one company. To call Google an Internet giant is starting to sound like an understatement.
What about Microsoft, Apple, etc?
Google may be the biggest, but it’s not the only player in town. Microsoft has a ton of servers, and then you have Apple, Amazon, Yahoo and several others companies that are investing heavily in the cloud (we couldn’t write this article without that ever-present buzzword, could we…?).
Bill Gates said about a year ago that Microsoft had hundreds of thousands of servers, and would soon have many millions of servers, so it’s clear where things are heading. While Microsoft most likely doesn’t have as many servers as Google, it is certainly expanding rapidly.
Since the biggest expansions are bound to be made by large companies with massive cloud ambitions – such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and many more – their share of the overall world server pie will continue to increase to feed various cloud services. Inevitably we, and the Internet, will depend more and more on these companies and the infrastructure they provide. So let’s hope they do a good job!
