It's hard to imagine Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) as anything but a search engine for most consumers and even business leaders. The company that probably has more grand ambitions than any I can think of may want to tackle providing computing horsepower to needy customers in the future, though -- and in turn, become a service provider of sorts. This is on top of its ambition to become the largest advertising network the planet has ever seen.

The scale of Google's global network and how it works technically would boggle the mind of many a Ph.D. It's those brainiacs who designed the sprawling network of Google's cheaper-by-the-dozen normal computer servers who are now trying to find more ways to utilize all that computing power outside of providing search results in a fraction of a second to billions of queries every month. As Google continues to build massive data centers, what is it going to do with all that power? Become Skynet, the infamous, world-dominating global computer network from the Terminator movies? Nah -- there are bigger business fish to fry.

Google's ambition to provide computing horsepower in the "Cloud" for university research, national laboratory simulations and just about anything else where tons of computer heavy lifting is needed is what appears to be yet another arrow in the search company's quiver. Massive advertising networks will provide the bulk of Google's revenue for many years to come, but the company has so many tentacles into secondary revenue sources (just at the beginning) that it's hard to keep track of them all. For Google's Cloud computing project, though, it may just be that Google's network will rule many areas of the world even outside the search advertising business where it remains king.