Intel has calculated that by 2012 20-25 per cent of its chip sales will be accounted for by the mega data centers operated by firms such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

The Register reported comments attributed to Jason Waxman, general manager at Intel's server platform group as saying currently around 10 per cent of the company's server chips find their way into the mega facilities and that this is set to grow.

"This includes the Googles, the Amazons, the Microsofts, but also telcos doing hosting like AT&T and Verizon and smaller Web 2.0 companies like Facebook. These are companies that are purchasing thousands of machines a month and putting them into data centers in the mega-watt range," Waxman is reported as saying.

The chip giant is reported working on optimising performance through pooling chip resources.

Google, Microsoft and others are reportedly pressing server and chip makers to change the chipset architectures and server set ups for optimal data center use to give higher performance and to run at hotter temperatures.

"With a cloud data center...what you're left with is that about 50 per cent of the total cost of ownership...is the cost of the compute infrastructure - server and storage - and about another 25 per cent is the cost of power."

The site reports Waxman saying that in a hypothetical data center spanning 50,000 servers dynamically allocating resources higher densities can save $35m over three years: $6m with hardware optimization, $8 with power management, $20m with better optimized code, and $1m with a better data center design.