by Andrew Blum
Nolan Young was happy to show me his data center, good public official that he is. Without thinking too much about it, soon after The Dalles’s fiber loop was completed, Young carved out a little space in the basement of City Hall where customers could put a rack of equipment and connect to one another—like a mini-Ashburn on the Columbia. Of course I wanted to see it; it sounded like a nice little piece of the Internet. “It’s just boxes and lights, but if you want!” Young said, and he fetched the key from his assistant. The Dalles’s town court was across the hall from Young’s office, and we walked past a sullen teenager waiting outside with his mother, then down the grand staircase at the center of the building, out the front steps, and around to a little side door into the basement. There was a small vestibule, linoleum tiled and fluorescent lit. Young opened a steel door, and I was greeted by the roar of blowing air and the old familiar electric smell of networking equipment. The Dalles’s data center may have looked like a glorified closet, but it struck me as an exchange point in its purest incarnation: just a bunch of routers plugged into one another in the dark. Young cheerily pointed out the pathways: “The customers come in here, jump onto our fiber, connect to each other, do whatever else they do, then pop back on our fiber out to Big Eddy and go wherever they go! The technical end of it is beyond me. I just know all that stuff goes to one spot and then it shoots out.” This was among the smallest rooms you might feign to call a data center—in the shadow of one of the largest. But in its homespun simplicity it was a vivid confirmation that the Internet is always somewhere.
Working with the press people at the Googleplex—“Design LLC’s” headquarters in Silicon Valley—I had arranged a visit to their massive data center that afternoon, but Young warned me not to expect much. “I can pretty much guarantee that the closest you’re going to get is the lunchroom,” he said. We said our good-byes, and I made sure Young had my email address. “I do. Now we’re connected! I’ll jump on that fiber, and there we are.”
From City Hall I drove the five minutes across town, over the interstate and into an industrial neighborhood along the banks of the Columbia, nearly at the entrance to the gorge. The vast campus was visible from a distance, sitting beside the highway. It looked like a prison, thanks to its towering security lights, loosely spaced beige buildings, and strong perimeter fence. Huge power lines hemmed the campus into the base of the mountains, whose middle reaches were still dusted with snow, and their tops obscured by fog. On the corner was an animal shelter. Across the street was a concrete plant. Every hundred yards or so I passed a white safety pylon with an orange top that said BURIED FIBER-OPTIC CABLE—Q-LIFE. I drove past a DEAD END sign and buzzed the intercom on the outside of a double gate. It opened, and I parked in front of a security building the size of a house. A sign attached to a second layer of fencing said VOLDEMORT INDUSTRIES in gothic script—a playful reference to the Harry Potter villain, known by the wizards in training as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” The only clue as to who actually owned this place was the picnic table with fixed seats, each painted a primary color: red, blue, green, and yellow, familiar from Google’s ubiquitous logo.
I had known when I contacted Google’s media relations department that seeing the inside of a data center would be a long shot, given the notoriously tight lid the company kept on its facilities. But when I stressed that I wasn’t interested in numbers (they change so fast anyway) but rather in the place itself—The Dalles and its character—they agreed to a visit. Certainly Google’s presence in The Dalles was no longer a secret. There may not have been a sign outside (except for Voldemort Industries), but the company had joined the local chamber of commerce, begun to participate in community activities, donated computers to schools, planted a garden just outside its high steel fence, and was planning a public Wi-Fi network for downtown. Granted, this all came at the end of several years of bad press, in which Google’s data center was portrayed as a poorly hidden smog-belching factory—an image incongruous with the clean white pages, friendly demeanor, and immediate access we otherwise associate with Google. Company officials had been vocal about turning over a new leaf, releasing some statistics from their data centers around the world, and even a short video tour. They seemed to agree that hiding their data centers was no longer the best policy. So the farce that came next surprised me.
Inside the security building, a pair of guards sat in front of a bank of video monitors, wearing blue polo shirts embroidered with a sheriff’s badge nestled into the first “o” in “Google.” Three visiting “Googlers” had come in ahead of me and were waiting for their security clearance, which involved having their retinas scanned from a machine that looked like a set of sleek coin-operated binoculars.
“Employee number?” the guard asked as each one approached the counter. “Step up to the machine.”
Then the scanner took over the conversation, a robotic woman’s voice, like a spaceship in a sci-fi movie. “Look into the mirror. Please stand closer.” Snap. “Eye scan complete. Thank you.” The visiting Googlers all giggled. Then the guard issued them a warning: make sure to scan in and scan out when you enter and exit the data center, because if the computer thinks you’re still on the data center floor, it won’t let you back in.
I wouldn’t have that problem because—just as Young suspected—not only would I not see the data center floor, I wouldn’t enter any buildings except the lunchroom. I began to realize I had come to The Dalles for a tour of the parking lot. Google’s first rule of data center PR was: don’t go in the data center.
I was greeted by a small entourage: Josh Betts, one of the facility’s managers; an administrative assistant, Katy Bowman, who had spearheaded the community outreach; and a media handler who had driven in from Portland. Things were awkward from the beginning. When I pulled out my tape recorder, the media person leaned in for a close look at it, checking to make sure it wasn’t a camera. With stiff smiles, we headed out into the rain, buzzed through a gate in the fence, and set out on foot across the campus. It felt like the back of a shopping mall, with broad parking lots, loading docks, and a tiny polite nod toward landscaping. The week before, I’d spoken with Dave Karlson, who managed the data center but was going to be away on vacation. “At the facility we’ll hopefully be able to show you around what it looks and feels like to be at a Google data center,” he said. But it took only a few moments of silence to make me realize that there’d be no guiding going on in this tour. Can you tell me about what we’re looking at, and what these buildings do? I ventured. Betts carefully avoided looking at the media handler, pursed his lips, and stared at the pavement in front of him—an information void like a hung web page. I tried to make my question more specific. What about this building over here—a yellow warehouse-looking thing with steam drifting from a vent? Was it mostly for storage? Did it contain the computers that crawl the web for the search index? Did it process search queries? There were nervous glances back and forth. The handler skipped a couple steps to get within earshot.
“You mean what The Dalles does?” Betts finally responded. “That’s not something that we probably discuss. But I’m sure that data is available internally.”
It was a scripted nonanswer, however awkwardly expressed. Of course he knows what these buildings do—he manages the facility. He just wasn’t about to tell me. But the march across the parking lot was an invitation to describe what I saw: There were two main data center buildings, each the shape and character of a distribution warehouse on the side of the highway. They were set on either end of an empty lot the size of a soccer field. There were two components to each of the buildings—a long low section and a taller end piece—that together formed an “L” kicking to the sky. On top of the L were the cooling towers, which gave off a hefty steam that rolled across the length of the building, like a Santa Claus beard. There were loading docks all around, but no windows. The roofs were clean. At the rear of each building was a series of generators encased in steel cabinets and attached with thick umb
ilicals of cables. Up close, the buildings’ particularly unpleasant shade of beige-yellow could only have been chosen for being nondescript, on sale, or to make the place look like a penitentiary. Their signage—numbers only, no names—was perfectly painted and rational, with big, easy-to-read blue letters on beige. The roads had clean sidewalks with gravel neatly landscaped to their edges. Enormous lampposts spiked the campus, each topped by a halo of silver ball lights. The empty field—soon to house a third building—was filled with pickup trucks and modular construction offices. Just behind the high fence the Columbia River flowed steadily by.
As we approached the far edge of the property, Betts called security from his cell phone, and a few moments later a guard in a gray pickup pulled up. He unlocked a pedestrian gate, and we stepped through. We all admired the small garden tilled by Googlers in their off time, although it was too early in the season to see much growth. Beside the garden was another orange-and-white plastic pole, marking the location of the Q-Life fiber underground. Then we turned around and retraced our steps.
Near the entrance to Columbia House, which housed the dining room, Betts spoke up. “So you can see for yourself the campus. We’ve walked the perimeter. You can see what we have to deal with and what we’ve got going. In terms of the future you can get a sense of it just by taking a look around.” I felt as if we were playing a puzzle game—perhaps the kind Google gives its employees as job applications. What was being left unsaid? Were they speaking in code? What was I supposed to be seeing? A bearded man pedaled by on a sky-blue cruiser bike. “I think we’re ready to go in!” my handler said.
Lunch was delicious. I ate organic salmon, a mixed green salad, and a peanut butter pudding for dessert. A handful of Googlers had been invited to join us, and as they sat down, my handler prompted each of them to say a few words about how much they liked living in The Dalles and how much they liked working at Google. “Can you tell Andrew what you like about working at Google and living in The Dalles?” she asked. Betts is a data center expert, second in charge of what I can only assume was among the most innovative facilities in the world, a key component of perhaps the greatest computing platform ever created. But he was sullen—preferring to say nothing at all than to risk stepping outside the narrow box PR had inscribed for him. We talked about the weather.
I considered expressing my frustration at the kabuki going on. Wasn’t Google’s mission to make information available? Aren’t you the best and the brightest, and eager to share what you all know? But I decided the silence wasn’t their choice. It was bigger than them. Calling them out for it would have been unfair. Emboldened by my peanut butter cup, I eventually said only that I was disappointed not to have the opportunity to go inside a data center. I would have liked to have seen it. My handler’s response was immediate: “Senators and governors have been disappointed too!” A guy came off the lunch line wearing a T-shirt that said PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ARE ANNOYING TO THOSE OF US WHO ACTUALLY DO.
It wasn’t until I drove away that it began to sink in how strange the whole visit had been, easily the strangest visit I’d had to the Internet. I hadn’t learned anything from Google—except all the things I couldn’t know. I wondered if I was being unfair, if the Orwellian atmosphere was just the side effect of Google’s legitimate prerogative to maintain corporate secrets, and to protect our privacy. On its corporate website, I’d even read a little note about it (which later disappeared): “We realize that data centers can seem like ‘black boxes’ for many people, but there are good reasons why we don’t reveal every detail of what goes on at our facilities, or where every data center is located,” it said. “For one thing, we invest a lot of resources into making our data centers the fastest and most efficient in the world, and we’re keen to protect that investment. But even more important is the security and privacy of the information our users place in our trust. Keeping our users’ data safe and private is our top priority and a big responsibility, especially since you can switch to one of our competitors’ products at the click of a mouse. That’s why we use the very best technology available to make sure our data centers and our services remain secure at all times.”
Google’s famed mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Yet at The Dalles, they’d gone so far as to scrub the satellite image of the data center on Google Maps—the picture wasn’t merely outdated, but actively obscured. In dozens of visits to the places of the Internet, people I’d met had been eager to communicate that the Internet wasn’t a shadowy realm but a surprisingly open one, dependent to its core on cooperation, on information. Driven by profit, of course, but with a sense of accountability. Google was the outlier. I was welcomed inside the gates, but only in the most superficial way. The not-so-subliminal message was that I, and by extension you, can’t be trusted to understand what goes on inside its factory—the space in which we, ostensibly, have entrusted the company with our questions, letters, even ideas. The primary colors and childlike playfulness no longer seemed friendly—they made me feel like a schoolkid. This was the company that arguably knows the most about us, but it was being the most secretive about itself.
On my way into The Dalles, I’d stopped at the Bonneville Dam, the massive power plant—built and still operated by the Army Corps of Engineers—that spans the Columbia River. It was a fortress. Coming off the highway, I passed through a short tunnel, with a huge iron gate. An armed guard greeted me, asked if I was carrying any firearms, and searched my trunk. Then she tipped her hat and welcomed me in. There was a big visitor’s center with a gift shop, exhibits about the construction of the dam and the ecology of the river, and a glass-walled room where you could see salmon swimming up the “fish ladder,” on their way upstream to spawn. It was a classic American roadside attraction, a somewhat kitschy blend of big government and big landscape, all tied up in a complicated story of technological triumph and environmental tragedy. For an infrastructure geek—much less anyone who likes watching fish—the dam was a great stop.
I couldn’t help but contrast the dam with the data center. One is owned by the government, the other by a public corporation; both are proud examples of American engineering. And they are functionally intertwined: it’s the Bonneville Power Administration that, in part, drew Google to the region. But where the dam was welcoming, the data center was forbidding. What if Google opened a visitor’s center, with a gift shop and a viewing gallery of all its servers? I think it would be a popular tourist attraction, a place to learn about what goes on behind Google’s white screen. For now, though, the stance is the opposite. The data center is locked down, obscured.
While visiting the Internet I often felt like a pioneer, a first tourist. But the dam made me realize that might be temporary, that there’d be others behind me. So much of ourselves is in these buildings that Google’s position will be tough to retain. I had gone to the Internet to see what I might learn from the visit. From Google, I hadn’t learned much. Driving away, I preferred not to think about what Google knew about me.
There was another way of doing it. Google wasn’t the only giant in the region. To the north was Quincy, where Microsoft, Yahoo!, Ask.com, and others all have major data centers. And just over a hundred miles due south from The Dalles was the town of Prineville, which might be as equally hard up as The Dalles but was truly off the beaten path. Yet Prineville was where Facebook had chosen to build its first ground-up data center, at a scale equal to The Dalles. That in itself struck me as an amazing testament to the advantages of central Oregon as a place to store data: four years after Google, Facebook had chosen it again.
Leaving The Dalles, a two-lane road rose up abruptly from the Columbia River Valley to the high plateau of central Oregon. Snow drifted across it in uneven streaks, crunching under my tires. There were actual tumbleweeds, blowing around like plastic bags in the city. And always there were the Bonneville Power Administration’s high-tension power lines, which march
ed across the green sagebrush like columns of giant soldiers.
Prineville was a hundred-odd miles away. What was the significance of that distance? Why hadn’t Facebook also moved into The Dalles? Or Quincy? On the map, they looked like neighbors. By virtue of being far away, and in a place where few people visit, it was easy to see it all as one place. But underneath the huge dome of sky, slowly lapping the miles, passing through little towns and empty crossroads, it was clear that each place had its own character, history, and people with a story to tell. The Internet “cloud,” and even each piece of the cloud, was a real, specific place—an obvious reality that was only strange because of the instantaneity with which we constantly communicate with these places.
Just as I’d been lulled into the landscape’s incredible expanse, I became distracted by the foreground, where spiked every few hundred yards into the red dirt of the highway shoulder were white plastic posts with orange caps. Eventually, I decided to pull over for a closer look at one. The cap read WARNING. BURIED FIBER OPTIC CABLE. NO DIGGING. LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS.
Denver-based Level 3 operates one of the largest global backbone networks. One of its long-haul routes is here, in the dirt, most likely several hundred strands of fiber—although only a handful are likely “lit” with signals, while the remainder are “dark,” awaiting future needs. Each individual fiber is capable of carrying terabits of data. But the bigness of that number (trillions!) and Level 3’s geographic reach were the opposite of what really excited me. It was the freeze frame: the momentary presence of all that in this very particular spot. When you click on a little photo thumbnail and wait for the big image to load, those scattered pulses of light were passing beneath the edge of US 197, near the speck on the map labeled Maupin, Oregon—if only for a nearly infinitesimal fraction of a second. It is difficult to say for sure which roadside and which instant. But it is enough to remember that between here and there there’s always a white-and-orange post on the side of a road. The path is continuous and true.