Data centers: The Internet's big pollutants

When you do business in "the cloud," it's easy to think that all your zeros and ones are getting processed virtually. Your computer isn't being taxed, so things must just work, right?

Well, things do work, but that's because of billions of calculations going on every second at server farms - rows and rows of computers housed in giant warehouse-like spaces all over the world.

A New York Times article this past weekend points to the pollution all this data crunching can cause. Turns out, in order to keep the servers up and running, there have to be back-up computers. And if that's not enough, each data center has an army of generators running, sending up smoke into our very real clouds.

The New York Times had an article over the weekend about the environmental impact of server farms. We'll talk about it on The Daily Circuit Tuesday.