Want to see a lot of cables? The Internet giant offers a look inside several of its data centers in the United States, Finland, and Belgium.
Stephen Shankland
Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and writes about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
Google's data centers can be vast. This one in Council Bluffs, Iowa, has more than 115,000 square feet of room.
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Google's colored pipes
Google's data centers use color-coded pipes to indicate what they're used for. Pink means water headed for outside cooling towers.
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Fixing a Google server
Denise Harwood diagnoses an overheating CPU inside a long aisle between racks of computing gear in a Google data center.
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Stormtrooper on guard
Google's Street View tour of a North Carolina data center includes this humorous view of including a Stormtrooper and R2-D2 droid from "Star Wars."
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Google's Atlanta data center by night
A Google data center outside Atlanta, Ga.
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Colored cables in Google data center
Google uses huge numbers of servers, as evidenced by this long shot down one data center aisle. The colored cables are standardized across the company's data centers worldwide so their function is clearer.
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Google satellite dish
Antennas such as this one receive satellite communications signals used to pipe TV into homes subscribing to the Google Fiber broadband service.
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Google cooling towers
These are the water tanks and cooling towers for Google's data center in Saint Ghislain, Belgium.
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Google data center in North Carolina
Google's data center at Lenoir, N.C.
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Oklahoma data center from the air
Google's data center in Pryor, Okla.
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Cold curtains
Transparent plastic curtains keep the cool air around servers in a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
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Dead hard drives
Hard drives that fail are wiped then destroyed on site. Here's a pile of some that were spiked by the Google procedure.
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Insulated pipes
The U-bend on these insulated pipes provides wiggle room for expansion and contraction as temperatures change.
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Google data center bike
Google employees use bicycles to get around their data centers.
