Data Centers Google

The virtual world is built on physical infrastructure. Every search that gets submitted, email sent, page served, comment posted, and video loaded passes through data centers that can be larger than a football field. Those thousands of racks of humming servers use vast amounts of energy; together, all existing data centers use roughly 2% of the world's electricity, and if left unchecked, this energy demand could grow as rapidly as Internet use. So making data centers run as efficiently as possible is a very big deal. Thankfully, despite skyrocketing demand for computing, data center electricity use has flattened over the past few years, largely due to enormous opportunities to improve efficiency as these facilities scale up.1 But capturing these opportunities can be a very complicated process.