Microsoft is eyeing many more UK data centres

 (PA Archive)
(PA Archive)

Big tech’s battle for cloud market share gets hotter by the minute.

Last year, Microsoft began construction on a £1 billion data centre in North Acton.

Not to be outdone, in January this year, Google unveiled its own $1 billion data centre after starting construction on a 33-acre site in Waltham Cross.

Microsoft hit back in February and said it would open another data centre in North Yorkshire.

And it isn’t stopping there. The firm last week posted an ad for a London-based ‘land acquisition manager’, whose full-time job will be to find and buy more and more sites for cloud servers, or, in the clunky HR jargon, “responsible for the delivery and pre-positioning of data center real estate needed to build out Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.”

Before long the whole nation will be covered with a thick layer of cloud warehouses, several thousand feet below another thick layer of cloud. Here’s to our digital future.

 (Evening Standard)
(Evening Standard)

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