Energy-hungry data centers are quietly moving into cities

When you think of a data center, you think of a farm with cheap electricity and tax breaks. There are millions of square feet of server space located in Northern Virginia and Oregon. Companies are weaving their networks into the fabric of cities to reduce lag times. The One Wilshire building in Los Angeles used to be home to a network of law offices.

The urban internet nodes probably don't look much at all. That's done by design. Equinix operates data centers that aren't supposed to draw attention to themselves. The headquarters of a for-profit college is located in the company's data center hub in Dallas. In Tokyo, the operation is mostly done on various floors within the city's sea of skyscrapers. Equinix is building a data center in Australia that is similar to the opera house. The building around Equinix's facility in Amsterdam was built without security in mind. He says that most people attempt to make their buildings fit the environment.

Spending on data centers in urban centers increased last year. The largest cloud companies are close by. In the US, Amazon Web Services has placed Local Zones in 32 cities, which are close to major population areas. The trend has caught the attention of Walmart, which may soon start renting out sections of its stores to host data centers for third party companies.

Consumers themselves have changed is one explanation for the surge of demand. People's tolerance for latency has continued to go down as more of our lives have gone online If you are using an online sports betting app, trading stocks, or playing a game likeFortnite, you will definitely notice a quarter-second lag, even if you don't notice it right away.

Cloud gaming, in which games are streamed over the internet without a console or phone, is being bet on by companies like Microsoft. According to the head of research at the firm, many popular games, such as first-person shooters, require a lot of quick reaction time. Without large numbers of data centers, games like that won't work on a streaming service.