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If Facebook is spending $100 million for photo serving, how much will OnLive need for real-time games rendering?
By Nicholas Lovell on March 27, 2009
BusinessWeek reports that Facebook is seeking $100 million in debt financing for its rapidly increasing server needs.
The reason: photos.
Well, not quite, but Facebook had 10 billion photos last October, when it had 100 million users. Now it has 275 million users, and has to keep building the infrastructure.
Why am I posting this? As a datapoint for the ongoing analysis of whether OnLive, the streaming games service, can ever be economically viable.
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As an aside, BusinessWeek seems to imply that Facebook seeking money for capital equipment is somehow a failure for Facebook. I’m surprised BusinessWeek is making this strange interpretation:
- Debt is cheaper than equity in the long run. So it’s not strange that Facebook should seek debt financing rather than selling more shares to buy its capital equipment
- Debt is difficult to get for Internet businesses, unless it is tied to the purchase of tangible assets, like servers. So this is a perfect project for which to raise debt
- It’s ordinary course of business (as Facebook’s spokesman said). Frankly, the BusinessWeek article is a non-story, I only repeat it because of the datapoint.
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