AI Term of the Moment
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Definition: data center
(1) For data centers supporting AI, see AI data center.
(2) A facility that holds servers and related network equipment. The millions of servers employed by search engines and cloud computing providers are all housed in data centers. Any mention of "the cloud" implies a data center somewhere, which typically has extremely tight security and may be built to withstand natural disasters. Housed in racks, large cloud computing data centers contain tens of thousands of servers (see rack mounted and cloud computing).
The U.S. Has the Most
With approximately 12,000 data centers in the world as of 2026, the United States has roughly 5,000. Great Britain, Germany and China each have approximately 500.
Early Data Centers
Until roughly the 1990s, a company's internal data center often included a library for disks and tapes as well as a control section that transferred physical documents to and from the departments in the organization (see data library). See server farm, darkened data center, data center container and underwater data center.
What a Data center Looks Like
A Cold War Granite Bunker Data Center
(2) A facility that holds servers and related network equipment. The millions of servers employed by search engines and cloud computing providers are all housed in data centers. Any mention of "the cloud" implies a data center somewhere, which typically has extremely tight security and may be built to withstand natural disasters. Housed in racks, large cloud computing data centers contain tens of thousands of servers (see rack mounted and cloud computing).
The U.S. Has the Most
With approximately 12,000 data centers in the world as of 2026, the United States has roughly 5,000. Great Britain, Germany and China each have approximately 500.
Early Data Centers
Until roughly the 1990s, a company's internal data center often included a library for disks and tapes as well as a control section that transferred physical documents to and from the departments in the organization (see data library). See server farm, darkened data center, data center container and underwater data center.
Today's data centers, which contain racks of servers, are often devoid of humans except for installations and repairs. A control room manned by people may be near or far, but the servers themselves are often in rooms with dim lights or lights off. See rack mounted.
Housed in the former Pionen civil defense center 100 feet below Vita Berg park in Stockholm, Bahnhof AB offers Internet access and a variety of cloud services in one of the world's most unique and secure data centers. (Image courtesy of Bahnhof, AB.)