Today, the Wall Street Journal reports businesses are purchasing an unprecedented amount of new computers and broadband-powered, cloud computing services to keep up with the increasing demand for high-speed Internet services:

"We've been buying thousands of computers this year," says Doug Erwin, chief executive of ThePlanet.com Internet Services Inc., a Houston-based company that runs data centers to offer computing services. ThePlanet says it now owns about 50,000 Dell Inc. servers. International Business Machines Corp., one of the biggest vendors of servers, said Tuesday that sales of industry-standard servers jumped 30% in the second quarter, after rising 36% in the first quarter.

The market research firm IDC puts spending on cloud-computing, a term that includes delivering computing capacity over the Internet, at $16.5 billion in 2009, and projects spending in the field will increase 27% a year through 2014—with the number of servers deployed in cloud applications expected to triple to 1.35 million over that period.

There are several reasons. Companies keep stepping up the use of the Web to reach customers and adding features like video streams that require more computing power and faster network connections.

Read the full story here.