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Definition: datacenter
(1) For datacenters supporting AI, see AI datacenter.
(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 datacenters. Any mention of "the cloud" implies a datacenter somewhere, which typically has extremely tight security and may be built to withstand natural disasters. Housed in racks, large cloud computing datacenters contain tens of thousands of servers (see rack mounted and cloud computing).
The U.S. Has the Most
With approximately 12,000 datacenters in the world as of 2025, the United States has more than 5,000. Great Britain and Germany come in next with each having approximately 500 datacenters. China and Hong Kong have about 600.
Early Datacenters
Until roughly the 1990s, a company's internal datacenter 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 datacenter, datacenter container and underwater datacenter.
What a Datacenter Looks Like
A Cold War Granite Bunker Datacenter
(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 datacenters. Any mention of "the cloud" implies a datacenter somewhere, which typically has extremely tight security and may be built to withstand natural disasters. Housed in racks, large cloud computing datacenters contain tens of thousands of servers (see rack mounted and cloud computing).
The U.S. Has the Most
With approximately 12,000 datacenters in the world as of 2025, the United States has more than 5,000. Great Britain and Germany come in next with each having approximately 500 datacenters. China and Hong Kong have about 600.
Early Datacenters
Until roughly the 1990s, a company's internal datacenter 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 datacenter, datacenter container and underwater datacenter.
Today's datacenters, 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 datacenters. (Image courtesy of Bahnhof, AB.)