Pillsbury’s experience with data centers dates to the dot-com era. Since then, we’ve counseled the industry as proprietary centers were supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, by physical and cloud-based systems of larger dedicated enterprises. The data center landscape is now international in scope and diverse in speciation, with edge,…
It seems like such a simple question. Who owns data centers? Ownership structures in the digital economy are more varied than might appear on the surface. While the largest computing and cloud service providers, such as Apple, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) and Google (Cloud)—also known as “hyperscalers”—do own and operate…
The rapid growth of electricity demand from data centers has emerged as a major challenge for the U.S. power sector. Much of this demand is being driven by the deployment of large learning models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). These workloads require large-volume, high-uptime computational infrastructure, and correspondingly large,…
By one count, worldwide there were some 11,800 data centers in early 2024. Within that census are facilities so small that they fit in office building closets, while others are among the largest manmade structures on the planet. How are we to make sense of this diverse population? Data centers…