Google's 2006 capex to expand as fast as its marketshare

What will Google be spending this calendar year in capital expenditures? If history is any guide, it'll be over $1 billion. From 2004's $319 million to 2005's $838 million, 2006 will probably be Google's largest year of capex in the company's history. With Google growing by leaps and bounds, this should come as no surprise at all to GOOG shareholders.

With its search business running at full steam and with a plethora of Google products launched (and soon to be promoted more, hopefully) and with its computational server farms and infrastructure peaking, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the company has load limits right now -- hence, it needs more infrastructure to support all this Google stuff.

With Gmail and Google Video being cited by Schmidt as Google products that have been limited by Google's available capacity, it surely needs to create and set more data centers online to handle the increasingly-painful customer load. Customers almost 100% of the time expect a quick Google response -- to a search query, to a Gmail message and to watching a Google-hosted video. If that slows down, customers can become very fickle. So, Google has a nice chunk of work ahead to stay ahead of demand.