The majority of us aren’t concerned with the background processes that run when we use Gmail, watch a YouTube video, or do a Google search. The computational requirements for bringing these services to the 2.4 billion Internet users are pretty hefty but Google’s billion-dollar network of data centers are able to handle more than 3 billion daily search queries and to index 20 billion web pages a day.
Physical access to their data centers has only been reserved for a privileged few, but Google recently commissioned photographer Connie Zhou to take a few snaps of their high-tech facilities. In a segment called Where The Internet Lives, we get a virtual peek into colourful and highly organized collection of coolant pipes, server racks, and tape libraries. See the arty photos of Google’s data centers after the jump. There is even a street view clip that shows the inside the Lenoir data center in North Carolina.