Overview

The cloud is not a cloud. It is a building. Somewhere on an industrial estate outside Dublin, a vast concrete structure sits behind razor wire and security barriers. Inside, row upon row of servers hum at precisely controlled temperatures. Somewhere inside is your email, your photographs, your medical records. Almost certainly a significant portion of the digital infrastructure of an entire continent. This is the cloud. And the cloud is the most consequential infrastructure built in the twenty-first century - and almost nobody who uses it knows what it actually is, where it lives, or who controls it. The Buildings That Store the World is a history, a work of geopolitics, and a sustained argument: that the physical infrastructure of the internet has concentrated into the hands of a very small number of companies in a very small number of places - and that the power this creates is almost entirely invisible to the billions of people whose lives depend on it. Inside: How three American companies came to control the infrastructure on which the modern world runs Why data centres cluster in Northern Virginia, Dublin, and Singapore The legal battle between American surveillance law and European privacy rights How Estonia built the world's first ""data embassy"" Why the AI buildout of the 2020s is the same geopolitical story in its latest chapter Why systems engineered for resilience produce fragility at scale Grounded in rigorous technical and legal detail, told with the clarity of the best geopolitical writing, this is the book that explains the invisible infrastructure that shapes where power lives, what governments can and cannot do, and who controls the world's most valuable resource. The cloud is physical. It is real. It is located somewhere specific on the surface of the earth. This book tells you where - and why that matters.

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