Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. Big Tech has a big cloud problem. From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lili Jamali.

The thing we call the cloud might sound harmless, but that seemingly abstract place where the details

of your digital life get stored takes a heavy toll on the environment. No, this cloud isn't

something floating in the air. It is millions of individual servers running in thousands of giant

data warehouses around the world. We're outsourcing more of our data storage and everyday computing

there all the time. If the servers fail, you might lose access to your emails, your precious photos,

or that presentation you're editing with colleagues in real time. And so these servers run 24-7,

which takes a lot of power and other resources too. Steven Gonzalez-Moncerante is a postdoctoral

researcher at Gota University in Frankfurt, Germany, where he studies cloud data centers and what

they're doing to the planet. Cloud is a metaphor, but what we really are referring to is a vast

set of infrastructures that are mostly based on the ground, that are threaded through the ocean,

in fiber optic cables, and undersea network of cables, satellites, and cellular towers are

supplementary to that. But the primary signal traffic is still happening on the ground and under

the ocean. If we use the metaphor of a cloud, we don't think of clouds as something that is

polluting. In fact, clouds are a symbol of nature. They're a symbol of a world in balance,

not a world that is tipping out of balance. You know, cloud data facilities have very real

environmental impacts. Can you talk about, first of all, the large carbon footprint? How big is

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