What they run
What they run
These buildings already run the ordinary internet. Chatbots are a new tenant. When DynamoDB DNS failed in us-east-1, Amazon Connect, Coinbase, Robinhood, Snapchat, and Hulu failed with it. That is the proof of the benefit, and of concentration.
What they run
What a data center is
IEA, Energy and AI: a facility that houses servers, storage, and networking. Cooling is about 7% of electricity in efficient hyperscale halls, over 30% in less-efficient enterprise halls. UPS and backup generators are rarely used. They exist for the reliability the services require.
What they run
Object lesson, 19–20 Oct 2025
AWS, post-event summary: N. Virginia (us-east-1), 11:48 PM PDT 19 Oct to 2:20 PM PDT 20 Oct. A DynamoDB DNS race left an empty record for the regional endpoint. Amazon Connect: inbound callers got busy tones or failed connections. Some agents could not sign in. Existing EC2 instances launched before the event stayed healthy.
Fortune, 20 Oct 2025: Coinbase, Robinhood, Snapchat, and Hulu were among the sites down.
What they run
Why one building
Uptime Institute 2025 Global Data Center Survey: respondents' weighted average annual PUE 1.54. Google, 2025 fleet trailing-twelve-month PUE 1.09. Google's own comparison: 83% less overhead than that Uptime average. That 83% is Google's comparison to survey respondents.
Amazon, AWS Summary for 2025, published July 2026: AWS global PUE 1.14, citing IDC January 2025, public-cloud average 1.25 and on-premises enterprise 1.63. That 1.63 is Amazon citing IDC, not our meter.
The objection that survives is the same event: one region. The alternative is not no computers. It is more closets, worse PUE, same services.