Google data center under construction in The Dalles, Ore.

The next sea change is upon us.New revolution in computing is under way, and it threatens Microsoft’s traditional business.

What is happening to computing today is a revolution, the biggest upheaval since the invention of the PC in the 1970s. But it is not without precedent. It bears a close resemblance to what happened to mechanical power 100 years ago.

Large, windowless warehouses, each the size of a football field and adorned with cooling towers, dominated the site. An article in the International Herald Tribune described the complex as “looming like an information-age nuclear plant”.

What Google is building is a vast computing centre, by all accounts the largest and most sophisticated on the planet. Designed to house tens of thousands of PCs, all wired together to work as a single supercomputer, it is, indeed, the information-processing equivalent of a nuclear power station, able to pump data and software into millions of homes and businesses.