Two seemingly ordinary stories — a bartender helping a customer set up his first smartphone and a neighborhood dive bar increasingly connected to the digital world — reveal something much larger about America’s demand for data centers. Smartphones, streaming music, electronic payments, Wi-Fi, cloud storage and now artificial intelligence all depend on vast physical networks of servers, fiber, electricity and cooling systems. The technology feels invisible because consumers encounter it through a screen, but the infrastructure behind it is very real. Communities have legitimate reasons to question where data centers are built and what resources they consume, but the demand did not appear out of nowhere. We created it one convenience at a time. We didn’t order the data centers. We ordered everything else — and the data centers came with it.
How Dive Bars Power the Cloud – Audio
