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The Buildings That Store the World

Data Centres, Cloud, and the New Geography of PowerBy Anita S. Sunde
Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices
Length5h 33m

About this audiobook

Enormous concrete buildings sit behind razor wire. They have no windows. They consume as much electricity as a small city. And they hold almost everything that matters in the modern world: medical records, financial transactions, government secrets, private messages, the entirety of the internet's memory. This is the infrastructure that runs the world. Almost nobody who uses it every day understands what it is, where it lives, or who has the legal right to look inside. The Buildings That Store the World traces the full arc of this hidden infrastructure — from the first computer rooms of the 1940s to the AI arms race of the 2020s. It explains the geopolitics of the cloud, the law of data sovereignty, the energy consequences of a world that outsourced its memory to a handful of buildings, and the fragility concealed beneath the architecture of apparent resilience.

Audiobook details

GenreTechnology, Politics and Government
Length5 hrs 33 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMay 2, 2024
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Introduction
15Part 4
2Overview
16What Data Is and Why It Matters
3Prologue: The Cloud Is a Building
17The Data Embassy
4Part 1
18The Other Internet
5From Machine Rooms to the Web
19The Military Cloud
Show all chapters
6The Wreckage That Built the Cloud
20Part 5
7Part 2
21The New Gold Rush
8The Warehouse Computer
22The Edge
9Where the Cloud Lives
23Part 6
10The Electricity Question
24The Green Data Centre
11Part 3
25The Fragile Cloud
12Amazon's Gamble
26The New Infrastructure of Power
13The Cloud Wars
27Epilogue
14The Internet Runs on Five Companies
28Disclaimer

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