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the math on this is pretty staggering to me.

360 billion 256 pixel square image tiles is about 21PB! (uncompressed, of course)

http://www.google.com/search?q=(256*256*360000000000)%20byte...

and you know they have multiple copies cached around the world for redundancy/speed.

It's generated on the fly from vectordata. The dataset is huge, but not at all on that scale.

That doesn't make sense to me, the article clearly says "pre-rendered". Maybe they don't render the middle of the ocean tiles beforehand but there would be no reason not to save a tile once it has been rendered.

Article says that cells sent to device prerendered it doesn't say ALL cells prerendered.

Obvoiusly they won't re-render tiles that have no new information since last access, not to mention middle of an ocean or desert.

Right, but there are layers that can't be pre-rendered (satellite) or are probably slow to render (terrain).

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