[tentonova2]

It is advantageous to them to have power, sure - but it doens't really directly contribute to their goal of organising the worlds information does it?

Is it any stranger than designing and commissioning the manufacture of their own server hardware as to achieve a more efficient ratio of price/reliability for their specific use-case?

There's a lot of information to organize, and doing it efficiently at scale requires moving quite a bit farther down the stack.

[mkelly]

I agree. A large-scale web company should care very much about power.

Designing your own hardware also, incidentally, lets you control power consumption.

[waterlesscloud]

Andrew Carnegie would have agreed.