Google Spent $951 Million on Data Centers in 4Q

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Google invested nearly a billion dollars in its Internet infrastructure in the last quarter of 2011, recording capital expenditures (CapEx) of $951 million. Google's CapEx spending was about $271 million more than in the third quarter of 2011, when it invested $680 million in its infrastructure.

The increase is likely due to early work on a significant expansion of Google's international data center network. In recent weeks the company has announced four new data center projects, including three new facilities in three markets in Asia (Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong) and a new data center in Dublin.

Here's a look at Google's quarter-by-quarter spending on capital expenditures.

A capital expenditure is an investment in a long-term asset, typically physical assets such as buildings or machinery. Google says the majority of its capital investments are for IT infrastructure, including data enters, servers, and networking equipment. In the past the company's CapEx spending has closely tracked its data center construction projects, each of which requires between $200 million and $600 million in investment.