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WonderTechnology fact

'The cloud' is really a network of data centres: large buildings full of computers that store files and run apps for people far away. They need electricity and cooling around the clock, and in 2024 they used about 1.5% of all the electricity in the world.

International Energy Agency, 2025

Technology

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When a phone backs up photos or streams a film, much of the work is done by servers, powerful computers stacked in racks, often in a data centre hundreds of kilometres away. Machines that never stop give off a lot of heat, so cooling takes a large share of the energy: efficient large sites keep it to a small fraction, while older company data centres can spend over 30% of their electricity on it. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 (a terawatt-hour is a billion kilowatt-hours), and that this could more than double by 2030, with artificial intelligence a major reason. A typical AI-focused data centre uses as much electricity as 100,000 households. The biggest ones are run mainly by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and fibre-optic cables on land and under the sea link them across continents.

Türkçe oku
“Bulut” aslında veri merkezlerinden oluşur: İnsanların dosyalarını saklayan, uygulamalarını çalıştıran, bilgisayarlarla dolu büyük binalar. Bu binalar gece gündüz elektrik ve soğutma ister; 2024'te dünyada tüketilen bütün elektriğin yaklaşık %1,5'ini harcadılar.
Uluslararası Enerji Ajansı, 2025

Telefonunuz fotoğrafları yedeklerken ya da film oynatırken işin büyük kısmını, çoğu zaman yüzlerce kilometre uzaktaki bir veri merkezinde raflara dizilmiş güçlü bilgisayarlar, yani sunucular yapar. Hiç durmayan makineler çok ısı üretir; bu yüzden soğutma, enerjinin önemli bir kısmını tüketir. Verimli büyük tesislerde bu pay küçüktür, şirketlerin eski veri merkezlerinde ise elektriğin %30'undan fazlası soğutmaya gidebilir. Uluslararası Enerji Ajansı'na göre veri merkezleri 2024'te yaklaşık 415 teravatsaat elektrik tüketti (bir teravatsaat bir milyar kilovatsaattir). Bu miktarın 2030'a kadar, büyük ölçüde yapay zekâ nedeniyle, iki katından fazlasına çıkması bekleniyor. Yapay zekâ için kurulmuş tipik bir veri merkezi, 100.000 hanenin harcadığı kadar elektrik tüketir. En büyük veri merkezlerini çoğunlukla Amazon, Microsoft ve Google işletir; karadan ve deniz altından geçen fiber optik kablolar da onları kıtalar arasında birbirine bağlar.

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Background reading: Data center
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WonderHistory

When Neil Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” on 20 July 1969, his words reached Earth about 1.3 seconds later. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) away.

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In the mid-1970s the Australian-born biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, working at Yale, found that chromosome ends carry a short DNA “word” repeated many times; in humans it is TTAGGG. She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for showing how telomeres, and an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds them, protect chromosomes. Each time most body cells divide, the copying machinery cannot quite reach the very end, so a little telomere is lost; when it gets too short, the cell stops dividing, which is why telomeres are often called a clock. But it is a poor clock for comparing people or species: mice have much longer telomeres than humans yet live only two or three years, and telomere length varies widely between people from birth. Many scientists therefore doubt commercial tests that claim to read your “biological age” from them.

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The atomic clocks on GPS satellites run about 38 millionths of a second a day faster than clocks on the ground, an effect predicted by Einstein's theories of relativity. Left uncorrected, the drift would put your position out by about 11 km within a single day.

A GPS receiver, such as the one in your phone, works out where it is by timing signals from several satellites orbiting about 20,200 km up. Radio signals travel about 300 metres in a microsecond, a millionth of a second, so even tiny clock errors matter. Relativity pulls the clocks apart in two ways. Special relativity says moving clocks run slow: travelling at almost 4 km a second, the satellite clocks lose about 7 microseconds a day. General relativity says clocks in weaker gravity run fast: high above Earth they gain about 46. The net gain is about 38 microseconds a day. So before launch, each satellite clock is set to run slightly slow, at 10.22999999543 million cycles a second instead of 10.23 million, and in orbit it keeps step with clocks on the ground.

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The Apollo Guidance Computer that steered astronauts to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of rewritable memory and 72 kilobytes of permanent memory. Its programs were woven by hand into “rope memory”: a wire threaded through a tiny magnetic ring stored a 1, and a wire passing it by stored a 0.

Designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and built by Raytheon, the computer was one of the first to use silicon chips (integrated circuits) and fitted into about 28 litres. Its memory was counted in “words” of 16 bits, or binary digits: 2,048 rewritable and 36,864 permanent. During Apollo 11's descent on 20 July 1969 it flashed 1202 and 1201 alarms: a radar left on in case the landing had to be abandoned was stealing processing time and overloading it. Its operating system, designed by J. Halcombe Laning, dropped less urgent jobs and restarted in a moment while the landing programs kept running, so Mission Control told the crew to carry on. The flight software was written by a team led by Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Its power was similar to that of the first home computers of the late 1970s.

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In 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis showed that a whole electrical circuit on a chip, cooled almost to absolute zero, can behave as a single quantum object, just like an atom. The discovery earned them the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The experiments were done at the University of California, Berkeley, in Clarke's group; Martinis was his doctoral student and Devoret a postdoctoral researcher. Absolute zero, −273.15 °C, is the lowest temperature possible. At the heart of the circuit was a Josephson junction: two superconductors, metals that carry current with no resistance when very cold, separated by an insulating layer only a few atoms thick. Vast numbers of electrons moved together as if they were one particle. The team saw two signs of quantum behaviour: the circuit escaped from a trapped state by tunnelling, slipping through an energy barrier it could not climb over, and it absorbed microwave energy only in fixed steps, or quanta, as an atom does. Circuits of this kind are now the qubits, the basic units of information, in the superconducting quantum computers built by companies such as Google and IBM.

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Next card in the archiveIn 1965 Gordon Moore, then research director at Fairchild Semiconductor, noticed that the number of components on a computer chip was doubling every year, and predicted that this would continue. In 1975 he revised the pace to every two years. The forecast became known as Moore's law.Read next →