Adinnieken on 27 May 2013
As someone who has worked in a data center, I honestly can't put a number to it. I can't even fathom the cost for bandwidth, let alone the electricity and cooling. The on-going costs would be significant.
Microsoft uses self-contained mobile data centers, built with commercial shipping containers. So I don't think this will add to their real-estate costs (land/taxes). Likewise, Microsoft uses remote monitoring on their data centers, so the amount of on-site staff probably will be roughly the same. It depends on what the ratio of staff to servers is and how many data centers they have that they'll be adding servers to.
