S8 Ep1109: The Invisible Power of Global Data Centers. Simon Constable. Data centers represent the digital future, with Virginia housing the world's highest concentration for the federal government. Despite accounting for over 4% of U.S. electricity usage, a quiz re
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2026
⏱️ 5 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
The Invisible Power of Global Data Centers. Simon Constable. Data centers represent the digital future, with Virginiahousing the world's highest concentration for the federal government. Despite accounting for over 4% of U.S. electricity usage, a quiz reveals that a quarter of Americans know nothing about these facilities. The U.K. holds the second-highest number of data centers globally. (14)
Transcript
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| 0:25.6 | This is a high risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong. I'm John Batchel with my good colleague, Simon Constable. |
| 0:49.6 | Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Simon recently posted a quiz that is confounding, and you will fail it. |
| 0:55.7 | I guarantee you will fail it. But why is it important? You might not care about data centers, |
| 1:01.3 | but data centers care about you. That's where our future is. Every purchase we make, |
| 1:06.7 | every child we have, every person that is going to come on the earth is going to pass through a |
| 1:12.7 | data center back and forth. You'll live in data centers. And so Simon did a quiz for the Wall Street |
| 1:17.7 | Journal. He does these things now and again just to frustrate know it alls like me. And I took the |
| 1:24.4 | first three questions. I got one right. It was a pure guess on the basis of which of these states has the most data centers. The answer was Virginia, because that's for the federal government. Your federal government is way out front on data centers. So we're now going to proceed to the questions we didn't get to last time. We might just get to a couple of them. They're really hard. |
| 1:44.8 | There's no way you're going to do this. Simon, you knew when you were putting this together |
| 1:48.5 | that we were all going to fail, correct? |
| 1:51.7 | Basically, yes. When I started doing the research on these questions, because I had to do |
| 1:56.5 | the research, and I knew nothing. And if I had taken this test, I would have got precisely zero things |
| 2:02.2 | right. Out of the ten questions, I would have had none. The fact that you got one in the first |
| 2:06.4 | three is really remarkable. This isn't about giving people a feel good thing. It's really about |
| 2:12.4 | getting people to learn something new in a different way. Now, when you open a newspaper, |
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