They don t buy from Dell or HP, and they could go even further down and say: We don t need to buy from Intel either, Intel could benefit from the rise of clouds. But maybe not.
— Horace Dediu, a tech financial analyst with think tank Clayton Christensen Institute, referring to companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. Citing the fact that Google outspent chipmaker Intel on big stuff like land and buildings and hardware in 2014 ($11 billion and about $10 billion, respectively), Wired says there is a new world order in tech and computing. It has been brought about by plenty of spending on data centers and hardware to store the cloud-based data central to big companies offerings and services.
What has happened in the last 10 years is that the players thought to have no capital expense are actually spending more than those, like Intel, that were held up as the most capital-intense, Dediu said, according to Wired. As things move to the cloud, the effect is on Intel and HP and Dell and on the IT departments of the world — an entire power-base for how IT decisions are made.
One example of how things might change drastically involves a report concerning Google and Intel. A little over a year ago, Google reportedly was considering making its own server chips using designs by Intel rival ARM.
Photo by Joanne Ho-Young Lee/Mercury News archives
