In a further sign of the vast scope of the battle to dominate the emerging utility computing grid, Microsoft today announced that it plans to build a large data center in Siberia, notes Data Center Knowledge. According to a local press report, the center will be located in Irkutsk (at a site to be determined), will hold “tens of thousands of servers,” and will cost approximately $500 million to build and outfit.

The Siberia announcement is another sign that Microsoft is picking up the pace of its buildout. Earlier this month, the company confirmed that it will construct a “mega data center” near Dublin, Ireland, and also announced that it will build its largest data center yet – the size of eight football fields- in the Chicago suburb of Northlake. These centers, all dedicated to supplying the company’s Live-branded software applications over the internet, supplement server farms already under construction in Quincy, Washington, and San Antonio, Texas.

Microsoft is playing catchup with Google, which is already reported to have dozens of data centers throughout the world and has this year announced new centers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Iowa, and the Netherlands. (Today’s Des Moines Register has a long article with some new details on the Iowa plant, which Google appears to view as an important “hub” for its North American network.) Altogether, the new data centers announced by Google and Microsoft this year represent capital investments of more than $4 billion.

Both Microsoft and Google are looking for creative ways to reduce the electricity consumed by their big computing plants. Google located its center in The Dalles, Oregon, beside the Columbia River in order to use the river’s water to cool its computers, reducing the need for air conditioning. One of the reasons Microsoft chose the Chicago area for its largest center is the cold climate. A Microsoft spokesman said “the cool weather can be tapped in innovative ways to cheaply and efficiently cool down racks and racks of tens of thousands of computers that generate loads of heat.” One assumes that Siberia holds a similar attraction.

If local communities are hoping these giant centers will create a lot of new jobs, they’ll probably be disappointed. Microsoft has revealed that the Chicago facility, which may be the biggest data center on earth when it’s completed next year, will employ a grand total of between 35 and 50 people.