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 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.