Speaking at Google's European headquarters in Dublin, Holzle said that instead of buying commercial servers at prices that increase with reliability, Google builds less-reliable servers at a cheaper cost knowing that its software will work around any outages. "For us, that's the right solution," Holzle said. Holzle was speaking to journalists during his visit to Dublin for the final day of the European Code Jam, a contest for programmers sponsored by Google in an effort to identify talented potential workers.

Energy efficiency is another reason that Google builds its own servers. Save costs on power consumption is important to the company. Holzle points out that about half of the energy that goes into a data centre gets lost due to technology inefficiencies that are often easy to fix.

The power supply to servers is one place where energy is unnecessarily lost, with one-third of the electricity running through a typical power supply leaking out as heat. This energy wastage creates additional costs as it results in increased cooling requirements for a building. To better deal with electricity wastage and avoid additional costs for cooling, Google has power supplies specially made that are 90 per cent efficient. Holzle says that this is not difficult to do.

Google has data centres scattered around the globe.