Developing the Necessary Infrastructure: Big data companies preemptively get new data center space before the need for it starts kicking in. Data center space is particularly nice because server power and data storage are needed for practically all their operations, and therefore are agnostic to what specific next steps the companies will take. This fits in with the "Flexible Strategy" idea.

As a side note, it's interesting how (some) companies are doing more of this general principle through not investing in computing infrastructure, lately - cloud computing providers buy the just-in-case servers, so the market as a whole has some computing power held in reserve, but not for any particular company.