According to Dave Asprey, no matter how many data centres we build, we will always be behind the curve of demand for capacity.
"I've been predicting since 2008 that ambient clouds will become the dominant way of delivering cost-effective, performance cloud capacity", he says in a security posting, adding that this is the only way I can imagine serving every human on the planet with cloud computing without exhausting the world's electrical generation capacity for data centres.
"In fact, one of the reasons I'm working for Trend Micro is that we have our own sizeable ambient cloud that handles more than five billion transactions a day with a fraction of the data centre footprint", he notes.
Asprey goes on to say that Apple's iDataCentre will cover about 500,000 square feet - about five times the size of the largest shared data centre anyone has ever built - and cost a billion dollars.
And, he says, Apple had better not suffer from data loss, like Amazon did in with its unfortunate 36-hour recent outage.
"If people will use iCloud for syncing everything - photos, audio, documents and more, across all their iDevices, they have to believe that their data is safe and won't disappear in an outage" he says.
"The operational stakes are very high here - if Apple's customers choose to store their family photos in Apple'' iCloud, an outage with data loss can be a company-credibility-ending event", he adds.
Asprey argues that the iCloud is the most advanced ambient cloud since Apple must have calculated the energy and data processing costs of storing everyone's music and video in its cloud.
And, he says, no matter how many cheap disks you aggregate, you still run into electricity and space costs.
"Instead, Apple seems to be saving that massive storage capacity for non-music and video files. Unlike Google, Apple is going to store individual copies of everybody's media files on their iDevices instead of in the cloud, and use the HA centralised command and control to sync copies of newly purchased music", he says.
This is, he explained, massively more efficient than storing copies in the cloud - "even Apple's impressive 12 petabytes would be overwhelmed with the contents of every iPod in use today", he notes.
Because of this, Asprey said that the move to an iCloud gives Apple a cost advantage over Google, and Apple has a much larger ambient cloud footprint than Google - at least it does today.