On a News.com interview of 9th December, a Google engineer warned about risks of electrical costs for datacenters hardware.
Google engineer reports that following actual trends within 10 years hardware will cost less than power needed to stay on.
And he suggests the industry to embracing multi-threading chip solutions.
I think following this advice could also lead to lowering the total amount of bare metal deployed in IT infrastructures. And the actual best method to achieve this result is consolidating servers with virtualization.
Google has a very particular hardware needs and server virtualization could not be the best solution for them. But eventually they are evaluating this kind of solution.
In any case all other world companies could find in virtualization a huge help in mantaining low costs for hardware TCO and should start considering it seriously.