Barb’s Blog

Google is considering taking its supercomputers on barges offshore. They would use wave power to cool and give electricity to their computers. Brilliant. Something tells me that isn’t the only benefit though, as offshore would mean not paying propery taxes. Google isn’t the only internet company looking for solutions and coming up with some odd locations for their data centers. The supercomputers housed in the data centres, which can be the size of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they do not overheat. As a result the internet is not very green. Data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world’s electricity in 2005. By 2020 the carbon footprint of the computers that run the internet will be larger than that of air travel, a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy firm, … Read entire article »