Google Data Centers and the Internet Economy

In a front-page story, The New York Times writes about Google’s new data centers in The Dalles, Oregon, which are getting the full Fight Club treatment from the company, to the point where the site improvements aren’t included on Google Earth maps. More broadly, the story by Saul Hansell and John Markoff should lead to wider understanding of the critical role data centers will play in the evolution of the Internet economy. An excerpt:

Google is known to the world as a search engine, but in many ways it is foremost an effort to build a network of supercomputers, using the latest academic research, that can process more data