Microsoft is investing $670 million to expand its data centre in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Christian Belady, general manager of Data Center Services at Microsoft, told Des Moines Register that the investment will help improve products like Xbox Live and Office 365. "The expansion supports the growing demand for Microsoft's cloud services," he said.

According to Jeff Henshaw, group program manager of Xbox Incubation & Prototyping, Microsoft's cloud will provide developers with the CPU and storage equivalent of an additional three Xbox One consoles.

"We're doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players," he said.

Xbox One will support a "more powerful, more personal and more intelligent" Xbox Live service, according to Marc Whitten, Microsoft's corporate vice president of the online service.

At Xbox 360's launch, 3,000 servers powered the online system. That number now stands at 15,000. Xbox One's Xbox Live service will be powered by 300,000, "more than the entire computing power of the world in 1999", Whitten said earlier this month.

Posted: Jun 24, 2013 7:51 am
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/415999/microsoft-investing-670m-in-iowa-data-centre/