If you're anything like the average American, you check your phone more than 200 times every day.

When you tap on the screen, you're asking your phone to retrieve and display some data.

Maybe a message from your friend or a YouTube video of a friendly Canadian showing you how to fix your dishwasher.

You're usually told that this data exists in the cloud, which might make you think it's

floating around in some ethereal network in the sky. But the cloud is much more material than that.

When you hit play on that video, your phone forms a request. It directs

that request to a cell tower, and fiber optic cables funnel it to a computer server. All of

these servers are inside thousands of physical warehouses called data centers. If you think about

everything on your phone, everything on a computer, it really is carried

by these physical building blocks and the data center is at the core of it, right?

All this information originates and terminates in a data center.

That's Raul Martineck, the CEO of a company called Data Bank.

I love being in a data center because it just kind of, it charges me up.

These days, much of corporate America feels the same.

The data center market has never been hotter.

Your local bank, hospital, and retailer likely all have servers in a data center market has never been hotter. Your local bank, hospital, and retailer likely all have

servers in a data center somewhere. We have customers like Carnival Cruises and AMC theaters, and we have

customers like JP Morgan and PNC Bank. We have major health care institutions. There's clients across the public sector.

We'll have state and local governments as clients. That's the whole infrastructure of our

digital lives, housed in nondescript buildings scattered across the country.

And with the rise of AI, we're only going to get more of them.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

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