Kai Ryssdal

Let's get inside and see these cabinets.

I hear a vague hum, right?

Is it going to be loud in there?

All right.

Okay, well, that's where we have crack audio engineers on the staff here at Marketplace.

So down a windowless hallway and through a locked door, we walked into a sterile-looking room with rows and rows and then more rows of metal cages.

Oh, and it's hot, too.

It's really hot.

It's really hot.

This is an operational computer room.

This is an operational computer room.

The amount of energy coming into this building is enough to power a small town, thousands of homes.

Best guesses are that about a third of the energy that data centers use goes to keeping all these computers cool.

We're in the hot area of the room.

We're in the hot area of the room.

There's a hot aisle and cold aisle configuration, which is done for efficiency purposes.

There's a hot aisle and cold aisle configuration, which is done for efficiency purposes.

If we put you in the cold aisle, it'll be below 80 degrees.

If we put you in the cold aisle, it'll be below 80 degrees.

We keep the cold aisle around 75 degrees.