Where the Internet Lives

Karen Ridley, a Zumba instructor and data technician at Google, and Thomas Gamble, facilities manager at Google with a rich background in hydropower, discuss the surprising integration of data centers in rural communities. They explore how the arrival of a major data center in Bridgeport, Alabama, has reshaped local economies and created new job opportunities. The guests share personal stories about resilience amidst industrial decline and the community's evolving relationship with technology, highlighting the transition from traditional coal energy to a greener, digital future.

Data centers are some of the most secure buildings on the planet. In this episode, we invite you to step inside and take a tour with one of Google’s top engineers. As we venture into computer systems that connect the world, we meet the people who keep these warehouse-scale facilities running. Plus, a little-known story about the scrappy origins of Google’s first computers.

In our first episode, we explore what data centers are – and how they keep the internet going, even when events like COVID-19 trigger historic surges in traffic.

"Where the Internet Lives" is a new podcast about the unseen world of data centers. In this series, we’ll go inside a data center and learn how the machines actually work. We’ll hear about the early days of Google’s first data center designs — and how they set the stage for today’s hyper-scale facilities. We’ll learn about how data centers are becoming a backbone of the clean energy economy. And we’ll explore how quantum computing, the end of Moore’s law, and new uses of the Cloud are changing the way we build the physical internet.