$700 Billion = 1,944 Cloud Computing Data Centers

Really big money is hard to imagine, even for business people. That's why journalists are trained to come up with visual devices to illustrate big numbers. When I was covering the S&L crisis, stories equated the bailout cost to a stack of $100 bills stretching nearly to the moon.

What are the visual metrics for the proposed $700 billion bailout of the troubled U.S. financial sector? Network World has put together a slide show detailing what $700 billion could buy your company, including the fact that it equate to 1,944 cloud computing centers, a figure based on IBM's $360 million data center in Research Triangle. If your benchmark is Google data centers, you can only build 1,166.  Or, if you prefer, you could go for the 3.5 billion iPhones.