Of
Helmut Martin-Jung
The green zero
You can recognize it by the small houses with fireplaces. Where it is on the roof, it is clear what is underneath in the large halls. Second indication: strange structures up there, which are needed to cool the devices that work in the halls. In the little houses, on the other hand, there are high-horsepower diesel units that produce what is consumed here in large quantities in an emergency: electricity. Because no matter how disembodied the digital world may appear, no matter how virtual everything appears on the screen, in the end the data has to be stored and processed on computers. This happens in exactly such halls, in data centers. That’s where what people like to and somewhat vaguely call the cloud has its physical home.