Apple is building data centers very far from being the state of the art, and very costly. (And they were probably not enticed to do better, thanks to their massive profits...) For example their latest $500M North Carolina facility is running off-the-shelf enterprise equipment from NetApp and Teradata!: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-06-08/tech/30072633... There appears to have been little or no effort spent on optimizing cost, cooling, PUE, etc.

On the other hand, the top dogs built their data centers from the ground up from commodity hardware highly customized to improve efficiency and reduce cost. For example Facebook's tech is well documented in their http://opencompute.org effort. Google is well-known to have advanced the start-of-the-art in designing cloud-scale data centers based on commodity parts: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html Ditto for Yahoo with their "chicken coop" data centers http://gigaom.com/cleantech/now-online-yahoos-chicken-coop-i... And Amazon is very secretive, but very likely doing the same and building EC2 on top of commodity hardware.

The cloud is a race which will be won by whoever has the most efficient computing infrastructure. Who do you think is going to win? Those who go as far as designing their own 95%+ efficient PSU running on 277V (Facebook: http://opencompute.org/projects/power-supply/) or those who buy run-of-the-mill NetApp appliances?

Hiring Noteboom is a sign that Apple's executive leadership recognizes the need to stop wasting money, and to start building serious data centers.