Take a look at this photo. If you think it’s
just a ship moored next to a beach then you’re missing something big.
And take a look at this building in East London. It may look like a regular,
boring old office block and that’s kind of the point.
In fact all these places are part of an unknown infrastructure network that
never stops running and keeps everything from your fridge to this video working.
As well as keeping your phone connected to the modern world they could also soon
heat your local hospital or run your local swimming pool.
That’s because they contain the cables, servers and computers that make up the internet.
And despite their inconspicuous nature,
data centres like these are some of the most innovative engineering to be found today.
Maybe you’ve never thought about it, but every video you watch,
every photo you look at and every article you read lands on your device thanks
to a vast global infrastructure called the “internet backbone”.
Among other things, this is made up of over half a million miles of undersea cables,
hundreds of exchange points and around 8,000 data centres.
This enables the data for this video to be requested anywhere on earth
and sent near the speed of light to your phone, tablet or laptop.
Data centres can be used for general internet traffic or for specific uses, like this one used
to host Microsoft cloud services. This is one of more than 300 Microsoft runs across 140 countries.
Constructing Microsoft data centres is a massive undertaking that can run up to five
years from conception to launch. It begins with a comprehensive assessment which looks at economic,
political, and environmental risks, along with security, insurability,
and market demands. Once all that’s decided, design and construction follow which involves
permitting, sourcing, and security measures all of which engages a diverse workforce.
These projects generate 300-400 jobs annually, covering electricians,
plumbers, carpenters, steelworkers, and more, with millions of work hours devoted to each
building. Microsoft also prioritises reducing greenhouse gas emissions during construction,
cutting concrete and steel embodied carbon by 30-60%, exploring low-carbon materials.
After completing the physical infrastructure, engineering teams integrate essential
hardware and software, enabling the Microsoft cloud to run efficiently.
Each of these sites is built around the needs of these. This is where the
internet lives. A single rack of these blade servers can store several petabytes of data
When you when you look at a data you will see rows and rows and rows of
these servers and each server basically runs anywhere from seven kilowatts up
to 48 kilowatts of power consumption. So they're really high performance computers
with millions of data bits that come in and out of those servers at a time.
To keep all that happening, they need to be powered, cooled, connected to the outside world
and kept safe. That’s no small task for the teams responsible for designing and constructing them.
Safety is a critical issue here, because if the internet backbone goes down,
then the internet goes down. Like in 2008 when Egypt suffered a near
total loss of internet after a submarine cable was cut in the Mediterranean sea.
We build security around the outer perimeter where we have security guards. the whole
building is sectioned off inside with a security station then you have to identify yourself and if
you're an employee you have a badge and you can come through that through the building.
But the best defence is just not to draw attention, which is why the location and
identity of most of this infrastructure isn’t on a map or even signposted.
we don't put a big Microsoft billboard out of front of the
data centre You wouldn't even know it was a microsoft data centre if you drove by
At the heart of this secure compound are the server rooms themselves.
The servers are linked by fibre optic cables, which are in turn linked with other server
rooms in the same facility by super high capacity cables to create a core network.
Keeping a constant power supply is crucial. For every megawatt a data centre is powered by,
it has just over one megawatt in battery storage and diesel generator backup.
In an emergency, centres can run for an average of 48 hours off
this backup supply before they need refuelling.
But aside from the energy used to keep the servers running,
a lot of power is needed to keep them cool.
Because of the amount of electricity they consume, servers produce a lot of heat which,
if left unchecked, can damage or even destroy the equipment.
How that heat is managed is constantly evolving.
In the past we used just air to cool servers … just like your desktop,
you've got to open up your desktop, there's a fan in it and there's heat sinks,
blowing air through everything to keep it cool … The beauty is once you go to liquid cooling,
it's much easier to pipe away that hot fluid. So now you could actually start
transmitting that fluid to local district heating or to a pool, the neighbourhood pool
These kinds of heat exchanges are already in use.
In Finland, work is underway on a heat exchange in the southern town of Espoo. A nearby Microsoft
data centre will make use of the low air temperatures to cool its server racks. As
the air warms it goes through a heat exchanger which is connected to the district heating system.
The scheme will help the region reach its ambitious CO2 emission reduction targets.
That’s important, because by 2025, data centres will use 20 percent of the world’s electricity.
But the need to reduce carbon emissions and
cope with ever greater amounts of data is driving rapid innovation.
This is Microsoft’s project Natik located off the Northern Isles in Scotland.
And it took the idea of water cooling to a whole new level.
the whole notion was, well, the ocean is cool and we would have cooling right
there. And so it really worked very well. And in fact, what we also found was that
because it was purged with nitrogen and there was no oxygen in the vessel,
the reliability of the components was on the order of eight times more. It's more reliable.
BUT if you think this is a radical idea,
future data centres might not look like a data centre at all.
we can learn from nature and actually develop data centres that are mutualisticly
working together with nature… how do we look at this game
differently? How do we make the data centre disappear? I don't know why to say visually,
but make it just one you don't actually look for a beaver dam in the woods. It's just integrated
into it. How does a data centre just kind of disappear in this one with what's around it?
And it's actually helping create oxygen as a whole as opposed to consuming oxygen? It
creates water as opposed to consuming water. This project near Amsterdam will be integrated
into the local ecosystem. Forests and wetland will be planted around the centre which will
boost biodiversity as well as creating greater storm resilience for the area.
So next time you’re on a sunny beach holiday, or walking past a beaver dam,
you never know: you could be just on the other side of some of the most
pioneering engineering this planet has ever seen.
This video was sponsored by Microsoft, you can learn more about that in the link below.
There’s also the chance to dive deeper on this and other topics on our channel
over on The World’s Best Construction Podcast – available now wherever you get
your podcasts. And as always , if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the
definitive video channel for construction, make sure you’re subscribed to The B1M.