Microsoft's exiting CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft has a million servers.

At the Microsoft World-Wide Partners Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that “We have something over a million servers in our data center infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less.”

Google reached its million server cumulative mark in July 8, 2008.

How many servers does Google employ? It’s a question that has dogged observers since the company built its first data center. It has long stuck to “hundreds of thousands.” (There are 49,923 operating in the Lenoir facility on the day of my visit.) I will later come across a clue when I get a peek inside Google’s data center R&D facility in Mountain View. In a secure area, there’s a row of motherboards fixed to the wall, an honor roll of generations of Google’s homebrewed servers. One sits atop a tiny embossed plaque that reads JULY 9, 2008. GOOGLE’S MILLIONTH SERVER. But executives explain that this is a cumulative number, not necessarily an indication that Google has a million servers in operation at once.

When will Amazon reach a million servers? When will Facebook? Is it really that big of a deal. Maybe if you are media and you are looking for a story.

To give you how clueless some people are. Who cares how many servers. The important thing is how many cores are there in the environment? The number of cores and the quality of them is what is important to run services. Not the number of servers. D'Oh.