cryptogon.com

This was a decade ago, when Pinkham oversaw the hardware and software that ran Amazon, and the company was considering a spot in the data center, which housed machines for many web operations and other businesses. Google would later pull a curtain around its data-center hardware, moving much of it into private facilities, but in those days, it was easier for competitors like Pinkham to lay their eyes on Google machines.

Pinkham was struck by how different the machines looked — and how hot they were. Even then, Google was running its website on dirt-cheap, stripped-down servers slotted into extremely tight spaces. They didn’t even have plastic cases.

“They were clearly not your average Dell, HP, IBM servers. They were white box machines, very densely packed. They weren’t in containers. They were just blades jammed into these custom racks,” remembers Pinkham, who went on to lead the team that built the Elastic Compute Cloud and now runs a cloud software startup called Nimbula. “And I remember a lot of heat coming off them — an indication of a lot of concentrated power.”

…

And now, according to James Hamilton, the man who oversees Amazon’s current data centers, the company is building its own servers in tandem with Asian manufacturers along the lines of Quanta and Foxconn, the outfit that famously builds Apple iPhones and iPads. Hamilton tells Wired that Amazon buys its server processors and memory directly from Intel, doing an end-run around middle men such as HP and Dell and other original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs.

Once you reach a certain size, says Hamilton, it only makes sense to build your own gear. Buying traditional servers gets too expensive. If you’re buying enough hardware to negotiate favorable deals with the likes of Intel — and you’ve got the means to hire people who can run this kind hardware operation — you can significantly cut costs by going straight to Asia.