I'm adressing it to you, VGmathematicians, cause I couldn't find any numbers on the web.

Of course it's a difficult question with a lot of unknown variables.

Any help, someone ?

I dont think anyone can accurately calculate it without knowing more variables. Especially the location of the servers as that is what will determine wage and material costs.

"So how does Microsoft scale from 15,000 to 300,000 servers? More data centers. This year we’ve recently profiled major expansions at three of Microsoft’s data center hubs inVirginia, Ireland and Washington state. Check out these stories for a closer look at the “cloud end” of Microsoft’s online experience."

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/05/24/microsoft-will-back-xbox-one-300000-servers/

We are not talking about hong kong or north pole, that's for sure

Depends on how many are real servers and how many are virtual ones.

Live Gold should do the trick.

Just now have to add more value to it.

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.

those are ones that have recently been renovated but there are others worldwide

Hong Kong is in fact included

http://matthew.sorvaag.net/2011/06/windows-azure-data-centre-locations/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/08/09/20-nodes-available-globally-for-the-windows-azure-cdn.aspx

US/EMEA

US

• Ashburn, VA
• Bay Area, CA
• Chicago, IL
• San Antonio, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Newark, NJ
• Seattle, WA

EMEA

• Amsterdam, NL
• Doha, QT  NEW
• Dublin, IE
• London, GB
• Moscow, RU
• Paris, FR
• Stockholm, SE
• Vienna, AT
• Zurich, CH

Asia-Pacific/Rest of World

• Hong Kong, HK
• São Paulo, BR
• Seoul, KR
• Singapore, SG
• Sydney, AU
• Taipei, TW
• Tokyo, JP

I am no master of numbers and stuff. But I wouldn't be surprised if the new profits that Micro may get out of the possible sells from used games and cuts from those sells, will make the serves pay themselves, as the servers will be doing the job of checking that your games have paid their due to Micro.

I feel those shiny new servers have, in great part, the purpose of checking on your games to begin with. You know, checking everyone's games constantly takes a lot of effort. Unless the servers aren't used for that?

It is just a matter of seeing if everything turns out alright for Micro.

A total of 300'000 physical servers or 300'000 virtual servers?

The honk kong one is for the p0rn !