In the latest earnings results released on Wednesday, Tim Cook mentioned that the iCloud service the  now has over 250 million users, up from 85 million back in January 2012. Such user numbers shouldn’t really surprise anyone as when you purchase a new Apple product you’ll be given the option to get an iCloud account in the setup process. Apple has sold a lot of iOS products in the last year, so it definitely helps in gaining more iCloud users.

iCloud is now a huge part of the Apple eco-system and they are spending billions on new data centers to host all the content that is stored on iCloud such as photos and videos.

In a talk with analysts on Wednesday afternoon Apple told them they intend to spend significant amounts on retail stores (probably focused in developing markets like China), equipment for suppliers (to help suppliers cope with the huge quantities Apple needs) and data centers.

iCloud is a service that allows users to wirelessly sync photos and videos from and to their various iOS devices and OS X computers. It can also be used on Macs to backup general Application files and settings, provided developers add support for it.