Before its IPO, Groupon promised investors that it was going spend more money on data centers. 

But its cash flow is brutally tight. Even with the $700 million it raised in its IP), it doesn't have the cash to build its own data center,  says BetaBeat.

The company had $243.9 million in cash and equivalents when September closed, according to the Motley Fool. But it owed merchants $465.6 million.

Building a new state-of-the-art data center could cost as much as $750 million with another $10 million a year needed in upkeep. At least that's how much Apple was said to be spending on its North Carolina facility for the iCloud.

Groupon doesn't necessarily need to build its own data centers to grow -- it has so far mostly rented space from hosting providers and cloud providers like Amazon, like most other fast-growing Internet startups.

Facebook, for instance, just started building its own data centers last year, despite having more than 800 million users, many of whom are uploading photos and videos and sharing content, which eats up massive amounts of file storage.

But Groupon is starting to think about it. Whereas the company was famous for growing  by renting nearly everything it needed from the cloud, it has started to build its own IT systems from scratch. It has its own homegrown systems for tracking deals to be analyzed for trends, for instance, says ZDnet.

Plus, investing in technology -- particularly data centers -- is one of the areas Groupon promised investors in its IPO prospectus.

We have spent and expect to continue to spend substantial amounts on data centers and equipment and related network infrastructure to handle the traffic on our websites and applications. The operation of these systems is expensive and complex and could result in operational failures. In the event that our subscriber base or the amount of traffic on our websites and applications grows more quickly than anticipated, we may be required to incur significant additional costs.

But does it have the cash it needs to "significant additional costs"? Answer for now seems to be, "no."

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