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Last week I took a daylong field trip touring a giant data center near Dulles International Airport in Loudon County, Virginia. The facility is owned and operated by CloudHQ.
A “cloud,” by the way, is the hardware that stores trillions of data files, research, love letters, the entirety of the Library of Congress and virtually everything else ever written, invented or retrievable online.
The cloud is synonymous with “data center.”
Many people don’t realize that without these massive data centers — that have somehow been demonized by everyone across the political spectrum from Elizabeth Warren to Steve Bannon — there is no internet, there is no data storage, there are no iPhone apps, there is no GPS, there is no missile defense system, there is no Uber, and there are no Amazon deliveries.
I am well aware that Americans are very split on the benefits of data centers, and the majority of voters say they don’t want one anywhere near their community. I’m in favor of letting voters of every community decide whether they want a data center or not.
But I also believe that if people actually visited a data center, as I did, they would be astounded by the jaw-dropping technological wizardry that lies within.
If you get the chance to tour one of these facilities, take it. And take your kids.
These data centers are multibillion-dollar industrial and engineering marvels. They (SET ITAL)are(END ITAL) the central nervous system of our future communications, commerce, health care, entertainment and national defense.
The data center I visited stores two football fields of state-of-the-art equipment that keeps the internet functioning and records and responds to billions of online tapping around the globe every minute. The speed and efficiency of these operations is mind-numbing. Contrast it with 1950s telephone switchboard operators connecting every phone call manually. Data centers are doing billions of transactions and computations across the country to service tens of millions of users every minute.
I wish I could have taken photos, but they are not permitted. Data center companies spend millions of dollars on security. They are rightly worried about drone attacks or Chinese espionage. If a terrorist took out a handful of our data centers, our economy would crash.
The Virginia data center pays way more than its fair share for the energy it uses and has lowered costs for homeowners and local businesses. That should be standard practice for all future facilities.
It provides more than a thousand jobs and helps pay for the schools, parks, police, hospitals and Little League fields.
I have rarely seen so many construction workers, heavy-load trucks and massive Caterpillar machines, and I don’t even know what they do. This is economic progress. It is the future of our digital economy.
I can’t help wondering what would have happened if Henry Ford confronted anything like the anti-data center movement over 100 years ago when he came to Michigan to build auto plants. What if people had blocked the plants from being built because they were too noisy, used too much energy and water, and polluted the air?
Then I wonder how angry Americans would be if they couldn’t access the internet or all their private information, or if their phones and computers didn’t work.
Over the next decade, we need to build about three times as many data centers as we have now. If we don’t build them, we fall behind technologically. America can’t let that happen.
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