Processing Power

Tom Vanderbilt has a fascinating article on the infrastructure of data centers, those server farms that make Google, Facebook and World of Warcraft possible. Every keystroke on the internet (including this one) relies on shuttling electrons back and forth in a remote air-conditioned industrial hangar. These are the highway ribbons of the future, the grid that's so essential we don't even notice it.

The article also mentions the energy costs required to run such server farms, which has real scie