Well, arguably, neither is terribly original

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThereIsOnlyOneCloudIconInTheEn...

It's not just the cloud-- the gears too.

Pretty sure there's a Google property with the same cloud + gears loading animation. Blogger, or Tumblr or Blogspot or one of those.

I think its the blogspot theme with the gears in a box that your thinking of.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

It isn't the same but Mega uses their animation in the same way.

SingleHop uses a very similar cloud + background icon motif (be it gears, a server or another object) throughout their site as well. Seems to be fairly common.

I find these gears icons funny because it is implied that all 3 gears touch each other mutually. But obviously, such a setup would prevent the whole machinery to work at all.

This is true for the Stripe one. The Mega one works (otherwise they couldn't have animated it ;))

Except the top and bottom left gears are rotating in contradicting directions. In fact none of the gears are even connected and are just rotating on their own accord. What's the point??

I always visualize them being offset in Z. Like if you're looking at a car transmission from the axle direction.