The New York Times has a report on the new "powerplant" that Google is building on the border of Oregon and Washington, near the Columbia river, in the northwestern US.
It's not alone: Microsoft and Yahoo are also building there, because electricity's cheap and the network connections are good. Plus the river means access to plenty of water for cooling.
And why? Because of you, and us: if we have to wait that extra millisecond for a search engine results page, why, we quiver with annoyance. So Google/Microsft/Yahoo aim to bring the computing closer to where the searchers are, or to distribute it better (the effect is the same).
At the time of Google's flotation there was a lot of speculation about precisely how big its Californian data centre was; some people then figured that it had to be the biggest non-military or government one on the planet.
The new building "will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks". They'll run Google's customised version of Linux (though we'd like to know - have we overlooked it somewhere? - what their database is).
And what holds it all together? Velcro. Yes indeed. The parts are "held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components". Less sticky than duct tape, I suppose.
