How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity

The energy-efficiency drive at the information factories that serve us Facebook, Google and Bitcoin.
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  1. Nicola Jones

    1. Nicola Jones is a freelance journalist based in Pemberton, British Columbia, Canada.

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A Facebook data centre in Luleå, Sweden.

A Facebook data centre in Luleå, Sweden. Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty

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Upload your latest holiday photos to Facebook, and there’s a chance they’ll end up stored in Prineville, Oregon, a small town where the firm has built three giant data centres and is planning two more. Inside these vast factories, bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row, stretching down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters.

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Nature 561, 163-166 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06610-y

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 13 September 2018: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong affiliation for Eric Masanet.

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