Google announced its first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, which included — as usual the past few quarters — an unparalleled amount of spending on data centers. The company spent $2.35 billion on infrastructure in the first quarter (much of which goes to building and filling data centers), up from $2.26 billion in last year’s fourth quarter and nearly double the $1.2 billion it spent in the first quarter of 2013.

We have been following Google’s (s goog) spending for years, because it’s such a good example of how much money web companies need to spend on infrastructure if they want to achieve massive scale in terms of users, services and data. Just think about Google’s products — search, cloud computing, Maps, Drive, Gmail, Google+ and more — and consider how many servers it takes to run them and ensure there’s enough capacity to scale them, handle failures or just experiment with new…