Microsoft says it has spent $1 billion on data centers and other cloud-computing infrastructure in Europe during the past year and pledged to keep investing there, more evidence of the escalating arms race with Amazon.com and others to build a worldwide network of on-demand computing tools.
Microsoft and Amazon are each spending billions of dollars a year to build, buy and lease giant warehouses full of servers to rent out processing power and data storage.
Amazon's Web Services, an early innovator in cloud-computing, dominates that business, but Microsoft has increased its investments in the past few years in an attempt to catch up.
Microsoft also said Monday that it planned to open data centers in France in 2017, an announcement that comes a few days after Amazon disclosed its intention to launch its own French data centers next year.
Analysts with Goldman Sachs said in an August report that Amazon Web Services sales totaled $10 billion in the past year. Microsoft's on-demand processing power and developer tools had revenue of about $2.1 billion, the investment bank said.
