Google a Busy Beaver
near Mount Hood, Oregon

In a hush-hush project, Google has been building a huge computing center on the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon, to expand it worldwide computing network, which already encompasses an estimated 450,000 servers, more than twice as many as Microsoft's 200,000, reports the New York Times. Using the latest academic research, Google apparently plans to build a network of supercomputers that can process more data, more quickly and less expensively than rivals.

The new Google project, known locally as Project 02, will tap into the region's surplus of fiber optic networking, left over from the dot-com boom. The Dalles city officials have signed confidentiality agreement with Google and will not comment on the project. But typing "Dalles Google" as a Google search query reveals plenty about the project.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending billions to build out their computing infrastructures to run their search engines and various web-based services, including mail, video and music downloads and e-commerce.