New World Order: Google Is Now Spending More Than Intel

Google/AP

It wasn’t so long ago that Warren Buffet painted Google as a wonderfully lucky company that could make boatloads of money while spending practically none.

According the Buffet—the Oracle of Omaha, the most successful investor in the history of Wall Street—Google could build enormously profitable web services, from search to Gmail, without investing in big stuff like land and buildings and hardware. “It’s far better to have an ever-increasing stream of earnings with virtually no major capital requirements,” he wrote in a 2007 letter to those with shares in his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway. “Ask Microsoft or Google.”

It was a ridiculous statement then, and in hindsight, it was a howler for the ages—especially when you consider who wrote it. This became particularly clear last week, when Google released its latest financial statements. In 2014, Google said, it spent nearly $11 billion on big stuff like land and buildings and hardware. In other words, it spent more on the big stuff than Intel, the world’s largest computer chip maker and a company whose capital spending was traditionally a high-water mark for tech businesses.

While Intel spent about $10 billion on the property, massive manufacturing plants, and equipment needed to build all those chips, Google spent $11 billion expanding a very different kind of business. Yes, it may have spent money on equipment needed to manufacture things like phones and smart thermostats, but the main point here is that the company likely shells out far more on the data centers, computer servers, and networking equipment needed to operate its vast online empire.

The world, you see, has changed. Google’s $11 billion is a wonderfully succinct symbol for an enormous shift in modern technology, a shift that will only get bigger in the years to come. What the Oracle of Omaha failed to realize is that in the future, the Googles and Microsofts will be among the biggest spenders, not the smallest. And together with Apple and Amazon, they will use such enormous spending to replace the very foundations of modern technology, pushing aside not only Intel, but also old-school computer makers such as Dell, HP, EMC, and others.

“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,” says Horace Dediu, a tech financial analyst with a think tank called the Clayton Christensen Institute. “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.”

In expanding their already vast internet empires, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple are spending unprecedented amounts on the data centers and hardware devices that underpin their online services. And as these internet giants push into cloud computing—offering services that let outside companies, developers, and individuals run software and store data without setting up their own machines—they’re eating away at the market for PCs, computer servers, storage hardware, and other stuff sold by the likes of Dell and HP. In the long run, they may undermine even Intel’s chip business.

The world isn’t just moving its software onto cloud computing services. Increasingly, we’re tapping into this online software from smartphones and other mobile devices—many built by Apple and Google—and typically, these mobile devices eschew chips from Intel in favor of designs from rival ARM. Intel still supplies many of chips that help drive online services inside data centers operated by the likes of Google and Microsoft, but this may change—with at least some of the web giants exploring the possibility of designing their own low-powered and low-cost ARM chips.

“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,'” Dediu explains. “Intel could benefit from the rise of clouds. But maybe not.”

In an effort to improve the efficiency of their data centers—and thus reduce costs—Google and Microsoft already design their own servers. Google even fashions its own networking gear. And chips are the next logical step. In years past, the top Wall Street minds—including Warren Buffett—frowned on such capital-intensive spending, saying that businesses were generally healthier if they kept cap-ex low. But at least for a select few companies, the opposite is now true. After all, these are the companies that will run the future. To do that, you need land and buildings and hardware—in spades.