Your Data Center Life

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 17, 2026

 

We are in the midst of a passionate debate over the desirability of “data centers.” Thus far, this debate has been stained by a profusion of silliness, superstition, and cynicism. But more than anything else, it has been notable for its profound tardiness. In 2026, data centers are such an inextricable part of American life that to discuss whether they are welcome is the equivalent of agonizing over what we think of this newfangled “television” thing. The public, we are told, has become anti–data center. If so, it is upset by the “center” rather than the “data” part of that equation, for whether they know it or not, Americans now rely on data centers in much the same way as they rely on their lungs. In every moment of every day, data centers are humming away behind the scenes, making the modern world possible. In 1973, Arthur C. Clarke suggested that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Were he writing today, he might have gone further: once that “magic” technology has been widely adopted, wonder can turn to contempt.

 

Certainly, we wildly underestimate the extent to which we rely on data centers. Take my actions today. This morning, I sat down with my coffee and looked through National Review’s website. To get there, I typed “nationalreview.com” into my browser, and before I’d even hit “Enter,” my computer used a data center to look up where that site was located on the web. Once that location had been discovered, my browser then contacted the website via its primary IP address — which, in the case of a popular site such as National Review, meant a digital “visit” to whichever one of the many “proxy” data centers happened to be geographically closest to me. After a secure connection to that data center had been established, my browser then started assembling the text, images, videos, podcasts, fonts, scripts, advertisements, and other elements that made up the page I hoped to see. Because this involved all manner of different content types — some cached, some dynamic, some streaming — and required the use of application servers, database servers, and distributed content-delivery networks, it invariably required trips to multiple data centers, all playing different roles. Thus, before I had read a single word, my computer had been served 150 web requests, across 34 domains, having contacted roughly ten data centers spread across networks operated by nine different companies. Because everything worked as it should have, this process was invisible. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Without seeing it, I had taken a remarkable journey around the world.

 

And that’s just for a visit to the homepage of a website. Presumably, like me, you have a smartphone. Have you ever thought about how it works? At the same time that I was visiting nationalreview.com today, my phone was relentlessly pinging data centers across the globe. An email arrived, a message appeared in the family group chat, a video from yesterday finished uploading to the cloud: those actions were the result of data centers, data centers, and — yep — data centers. When my weather widget refreshed its forecast, my calendar picked up a change to an appointment, one of my apps downloaded an update, and my stock ticker moved: data centers did that. Each one of the little conveniences that I have slowly stacked over time involved computers in one or more data centers doing work on my behalf. Magic? Not on your life.

 

Having had my coffee, I ran some errands in my car, and as usual, I used Waze to avoid the traffic. In so doing, I blithely connected to an unfathomably impressive piece of infrastructure — all of which remained out of sight. My phone accurately calculated its position on Earth by listening to a series of precisely timed signals sent from a bunch of satellites up in space and comparing the data issued by each to determine where I was. At the same time, its internet connection linked it to a host of servers that, among other things, supplied the requisite maps, calculated optimal directions, and processed real-time traffic information that had been collected from other drivers. To obtain even the simplest of instructions — “turn left” — I was the beneficiary of signals from space, mathematics in my pocket, and information that had been processed by distant computers in data centers across the world. While driving, I turned on Apple Music, and thanks to a data center nearby, I had at my disposal virtually all of the music that has ever been recorded. On my way home, I made a phone call to my wife and thereby relied on a data center in my carrier’s network to connect us and route my conversation to the right place. Had I driven through a toll, a data center would have matched my transponder to my billing record. If I’d stopped for gas or lunch and paid by card, the payment would have been authorized by my bank’s data centers. All this, for a simple trip to the barber!

 

We take all this for granted. Once, we had to go to the bank to cash a check, wait on the phone to buy a plane ticket, take a trip to a shop to buy a light bulb, drive to a video store to rent a movie, call theaters for showtimes, and consult encyclopedias to find the most elementary of facts. We don’t now — because of data centers. On Sundays, during NFL season, I watch the games over the internet on my TV, which requires a lot of data centers; I participate in two fantasy football leagues and one pick ’em league, all of which are hosted in data centers; and, like many others, I text my friends during the games — via a data center, naturally. So reflexive is this behavior that we have forgotten how it works. But we’d notice if it went away. If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

 

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another data center, that is maintained by another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

 

I am not deaf to the criticisms of the architects of our present artificial intelligence boom, many of whom have inexplicably decided to sell their product by telling people that it will put them out of work or perhaps even kill them. But I cannot accept the argument that America’s many data centers have been built despite the public rather than because of it. Whether they wish to admit it or not, Americans love the internet. They have filled “the cloud” with baby pictures, wedding videos, group chats, school assignments, tax returns, saved games, and emails stretching back 20 years. They expect their entire photo library to survive a lost phone, their documents to appear on whichever computer they happen to be using, and the 107 videos of their child’s first steps to remain available indefinitely.

 

In aggregate, the scale of data storage may be vast, but the items that make it up are invariably personal. The retention of this information has required an extraordinary amount of physical infrastructure, and there is no good reason to expect that AI will be any different. Pew reports that half of American adults have used AI, and that a quarter — that’s 65 million people — use AI every day. In computing jargon, this translates into antiseptic terms: “exabytes,” “teraflops,” “megawatts,” and the like. But that’s a distraction from what matters — which is that when someone types “How do I fix my dishwasher?” into his iPhone, he expects to receive an answer.