As numbers go, 36 isn’t a stunning one; some companies have locations numbering in the hundreds or thousands.  Still, Pingdom has tracked down three dozen of Google’s data centers and plotted them on a map worth seeing.

It’s only natural that companies would compete with each other to be "in vogue" – fashionable, popular, and so on.  But Microsoft and Google may be competing to be in vague, as word comes that Google could build a data center in Lithuania.

As far as datacenters are concerned, Google and Microsoft have been in the spotlight for the past few months.  Yahoo’s not ignoring the subject, though, and did, in fact, recently open a datacenter of its own in Quincy, Washington.

Homeowners appreciate not having power lines all around them, and it turns out that the owners of datacenters feel the same way.  Only datacenters need a lot of energy, so in Northern Virginia, DuPont Fabros is kind of stuck.

When Microsoft announced its desire to spend $500 million on a datacenter in Chicago, fellow WebProNews writer David Utter referred to that sum as “Monopoly money” in Microsoft’s eyes.  And now there’s word that Microsoft will plunk down another hotel – er, datacenter – in Ireland.

Google’s market cap is currently hovering around $177 billion, and although that sum can’t perform magic, it is a powerful motivator – construction on the search giant’s Lenoir, North Carolina facility is apparently moving along at a surprising pace.

The last time we heard about Google’s data center in South Carolina, there was a concern that the company hadn’t (yet) hired many locals.  Google’s now gone out of its way to make friends; on one website, Mountain View has even written, “Hello, Berkeley County!”