Physical Design (2000s)
For decades, data centers were cooled like freezers.

Google re-imagined them as a warehouse-scale computer.
Hot/cold aisle containment. Smarter siting in cool+dry climates. PUE to push competition

PUE dropped from ~2.0 → ~1.1. Waste dramatically decreased.

Virtualization (1990s)
Server closets were full of idle machines.

VMware solved it by slicing one server into many “virtual” ones.
This made the cloud business model possible.
AWS didn’t rent physical boxes—they rented slices.

Time-Sharing (1960s)
Mainframes once ran one job at a time while engineers waited in line.

MIT’s CTSS system let dozens of people share a computer simultaneously.
The first leap from “single-task” to maximizing utilization.

Everyone’s talking about the explosion in data center energy use.

But the real shock isn’t how high it’s going.
It’s the quiet miracle of how flat energy use stayed while the internet grew exponentially.

What a chart.

Not black, not a Friday, and not a week!