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Welcome to the third episode of the Stepchange Show—where we explore the stories of human progress.
Every time you stream a movie, send a text message, call a car, or talk to what feels like a fully formed computational consciousness, you’re touching an invisible, physical empire. We call it the cloud, but it isn’t in the sky. It lives in nearly 12,000 buildings around the world, consuming almost five percent of U.S. electricity and running through cables laid across the ocean floor.
This is the story of data centers. From the humming punch-card rooms of the early 1900s to the Cold War projects that accidentally birthed the internet, and onward to the gigawatt-scale AI factories of today, data centers have quietly become the industrial engine of our era. Six companies—Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—now dominate global markets in part because they command this infrastructure, just as railroads, steel, and oil once defined the fortunes of earlier ages.
Data centers are the machines behind the modern world. They shape commerce, media, communication, and now artificial intelligence—while raising profound questions about energy, water, and climate in the decades to come.
[00:00:29] The Invisible Empire of Data Centers
[00:03:16] IBM Punch Cards: The First Nerve Center
[00:17:25] SAGE: Connecting the Mainframes
[00:27:40] The APARNET: The Cold War Births the Internet
[00:50:05] The .Com Boom: The World Gets Wired
[01:17:15] AWS: The Utility of the Cloud
[01:36:56] Google: Warehouse Scale Computers
[01:59:02] Microsoft: From Software to Services
[02:19:17] Facebook: Sharing the Blueprints
[02:33:50] COVID: Five Years of Growth in 18 Months
[02:47:58] AI: The Dawn of the AI Age, Powered by NVIDIA
[02:59:12] Power & Water: The Gigawatt Problem
[03:12:57] Chips: The New Cold War
[03:24:45] Climate: The Emissions of Data Centers
[03:37:17] Present Day Scale: Compute, Storage, and Communication
[03:46:01] Themes: Our Takeaways and Reflections
