Stat­ing that mod­ern giz­mos (in this exam­ple, the iPhone) are no longer just depen­dent on highly inte­grated and devel­oped sys­tems for their pro­duc­tion, but now also depend upon “a vast array of infra­struc­tures, data ecolo­gies, and device net­works” for their oper­a­tion, Rob Holmes’ “mind-boggling update to I, Pen­cil”* looks at the land­scapes of extrac­tion, assem­bly and oper­a­tion mod­ern gad­gets cre­ate.

As Google is, like Apple, quite secre­tive about the details of the phys­i­cal loci of its imma­te­r­ial prod­uct, the loca­tions of less than half of Google’s Amer­i­can data cen­ters are known, with those known cen­ters spread between Cal­i­for­nia (five cen­ters), Ore­gon (two), Geor­gia (two), Vir­ginia (three), Wash­ing­ton, Illi­nois, Texas, Florida, North Car­olina, South Car­olina, Okla­homa, and Iowa.

The first of these data cen­ters to be con­structed is in The Dalles, Ore­gon, and “includes three 68,680 square foot data cen­ter build­ings, a 20,000 square foot admin­is­tra­tion build­ing, a 16,000 square foot ‘tran­sient employee dor­mi­tory’ and an 18,000 square foot facil­ity for cool­ing tow­ers”. Like Google’s other data cen­ters, the Dalles facil­ity con­sumes enor­mous quan­ti­ties of elec­tric­ity (esti­mates range from 50 to 100 megawatts — some­where between a tenth and a twen­ti­eth of the capac­ity of an aver­age Amer­i­can coal-fired power plant), gen­er­at­ing sim­i­larly large quan­ti­ties of heat, which neces­si­tates locat­ing the cen­ters by sig­nif­i­cant water sources for the chillers and water tow­ers which cool the servers.

Inside, the data cen­ters are filled with stan­dard ship­ping con­tain­ers, each con­tainer packed with over a thou­sand indi­vid­ual servers run­ning cheap x86 proces­sors: anony­mous, mod­u­lar data land­scapes, the nerve cen­ters of America’s conur­ba­tions, their stan­dard­iza­tion and dull rec­ti­lin­ear­ity indi­cat­ing extreme place­less­ness, but con­tra­dicted by the logis­ti­cal logic of water bod­ies, energy sources, and trans­mis­sion dis­tances which gov­erns their placement.

* As Simon Bostock called it (via).