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Roughly 4,000 operational data center facilities are running across the United States, processing the digital requests behind nearly every online service Americans use daily.
Thousands more are planned or under construction as demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence accelerates. The infrastructure runs continuously and is largely invisible to the users who depend on it.
Brittany Kaiser, CEO of Alpha Compute, characterized the reach of this infrastructure simply: any time someone touches technology, whether through social media or email, all of that data is being processed in a data center.
The service categories Streaming platforms including Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify store enormous content libraries and move data quickly enough to prevent buffering for millions of simultaneous users.
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