Microsoft senior VP of research Rick Rashid remarked the other day that 20% of all servers are being bought by a handful of large Internet companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. It's evidence that, behind all the talk about cloud computing, there are huge investments in server infrastructure.The anecdote was shared by Financial Times' Richard Waters in a blog post titled "How many computers does the world need?" Waters writes that Rashid made the comment during "a small dinner in San Francisco," making it difficult to verify. He refers to the 20% figure as an "amazing statistic." Nicholas Carr, in commenting on Waters' post, refers to it as "an incredible, and telling, data point."

Amazing? Yes. Telling? Yes. Surprising? No.

I was told something similar by Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos a couple years ago in explaining his "red shift" theory, in which a few companies account for a disproportionate amount of IT infrastructure and consumption. As it happens, that conversation took place over dinner in New York, and InformationWeek followed up with a story, "The Red Shift Theory." I don't recall if Papadopoulos was as specific as Rashid in assigning a percentage to his observation about heavy-duty IT consumers, but InformationWeek explained it this way at the time: "an elite group of companies are acquiring inordinate amounts of IT infrastructure, well beyond most other businesses, and their demand is growing exponentially."

According to Papadopoulos, the red shift phenomenon threatened to exceed the ability of Moore's Law to keep up. The answer? Utility computing, or the cloud.

I'm not suggesting that Rashid is mimicking Papadopoulos's idea. Rather, even casual observers could come to the same conclusion as these two respected computer scientists simply by following the money. The locals in the middle of Iowa know that Microsoft and Google are building new data centers there at $600 million a pop, construction delays notwithstanding.

The tens of thousands of servers going into these new and existing data centers underlie the Web traffic and content of not just the companies running them, but millions of consumers and thousands of business customers. Increasingly, through virtualization and multitenant architectures, they're being used in support of cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services, Google Apps Engine, Microsoft's Azure services, and Salesforce's software-as-a-service and Force.com offerings.