LIKE a real-life version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, the mysterious compound is the size of two football fields, with twin cooling towers rising above a small town on the banks of the Columbia River.

To those who live in The Dalles, 80 miles east of Portland, Oregon, the plant is known only as Project 02. It has created hundreds of construction jobs and a housing boom with 40 per cent price rises. But no one has been invited to an opening ceremony.

“They’re being very standoffish in the community,” Susan Huntington, the executive director of The Dalles area chamber of commerce, said. “They’re trying to keep it out of the news. They want to be left alone to do what they’re doing out there.”

At least one thing is known: the factory is owned by Google, and is part of its secretive quest to build the biggest supercomputer. This computer, which shares the nickname Googleplex with the company’s headquarters and a device in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is made up of installations across the globe, linked by fibre-optic cables that can handle billions of search queries a day. Some say that the speed of light is its only limitation.

With rivals such as Microsoft and Yahoo! racing to catch up, Google is reluctant to share details. Local officials have been asked to sign confidentiality agreements. Google is also probably concerned about a terrorist attack aimed at taking down the world wide web.

A Google source would say only: “Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is.” Analysts agree. “It is simply not in Google’s interests to give competitors an insight into its long-term strategic plans,” said Christopher Hickey, who works for Atlantic Equities in London. “The company needs to continue investing in its infrastructure as search volumes increase and it starts to move into more data-intensive areas, such as video.”

Oregon is regarded as the ideal location for a factory full of computer processors. There are plenty of power plants near by, meaning cheap electricity, and also a glut of fibre-optic cable left over from the 1990s dot-com boom.As fanciful as it sounds, the Googleplex is deadly serious. Five years ago Google had only 8,000 computer servers. Today that number is thought to be nearly half a million. Microsoft is thought to have “ only” 200,000 servers. The scale of the investment allows Google to launch ever more ambitious online products, such as the mapping service Google Earth and Google Office Suite, a rival to Microsoft Office. One of Google’s most controversial proposals is to end the so-called “dead-tree problem” — digitising every book ever printed and creating an online indexing system similar to its web searching software. This could render libraries obsolete.

Google is being sued by publishers to stop the book project; it is also being sued by a mapping company which argues that Google Earth is based on its patented technology.

Regardless, Google remains in the black. During the first quarter of this year the company reported a net profit of just under $600 million. On Wall Street the company is valued at about $120 billion.

Microsoft recently shocked investors by declaring that it would have to spend $2 billion next year on infrastructure for its online services. The bigger threat is that free or cheap office software from Google may end the need for companies to buy expensive licences for Word or Excel, the core of Microsoft’s business.

Microsoft can be comforted by one thing: Google is fast usurping its reputation as the sinister force in the information economy. Google’s slogan remains “Don’t Be Evil”, a throwback to its more idealistic days. But its nicknames range from the Borg (after the Star Trek villain) to “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”, from Harry Potter.

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