Chapter 31: Buildings

Data centers are the physical homes of planetary scale computers. A modern data center is an engineering marvel: a building designed from the ground up to house, power, cool, and connect thousands of servers operating at high utilization around the clock.

The design of a data center is driven by several constraints. Power is the primary cost and the primary limitation — a large data center may consume as much electricity as a small city. Cooling must dissipate the heat generated by thousands of servers, using techniques ranging from traditional air conditioning to liquid cooling and free-air cooling in cold climates. Network connectivity must provide high-bandwidth, low-latency links to other data centers and to the broader Internet.

Data center location is a strategic decision. Factors include proximity to users (for low latency), proximity to renewable energy (for sustainability), risk of natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes), political stability, and real estate costs. Major cloud providers operate data centers on every inhabited continent, with each region typically containing multiple data centers (called availability zones) for redundancy.