One of the most unfortunate marketing ideas has been calling it “the cloud”—a word so abstract it detaches it from human understanding.
It makes you think your photos, emails, and digital memories float in the air. As if heaven added storage and customer support, with no late fees. It feels distant, invisible, and perhaps somewhat suspicious—something hovering above you.
But the cloud was never actually in the sky. It has always been inside a building.
And now, more often, that building is in your community. Not watching you, but sitting quietly and preserving those memories you’ve spent your life building.
All over America, communities are seeing new data centers appear. These long, windowless buildings make no effort to look charming. They hum quietly and sit on land that was once empty. They aren’t built to impress. No one has ever said, “Let’s do the Christmas card photo in front of Server 12.” They look unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things make us uneasy.
So why are these buildings needed? Why here? Why can’t it be somewhere else, somewhere out of sight, somewhere that doesn’t require contentious zoning meetings?
Data centers aren’t just an idea; they are the libraries of our digital age.
Inside, there are servers—rows of special computers that store and protect information. They keep your Kindle book you reread every December, the photos in your digital frame, your payroll deposits, retirement account, business invoices, and property records. They make sure your paycheck arrives, your mortgage is tracked, and your life continues smoothly. You might forget your password, but the building remembers you. Not because it knows you, but because it is responsible for safeguarding the things we hold most dear.
We save delicate scrapbooks and letters, written in cursive by people we remember in shoeboxes. We believe memories deserve a real, physical home.
But when preservation looks like a data center, people suddenly see it as an eyesore.
Data centers are built in communities like yours because they need electricity, land, and stability. They need to be somewhere that still values permanence. What these buildings store isn’t just corporate data. It’s personal.
They’re holding onto the photo of your mom’s handwritten cookie recipe—the one she never measured, and you still have never quite got right. They’ve got the video of her folding dough before arthritis made it hard. They even keep the record of the version you tried after she was gone, standing in the same kitchen, hoping muscle memory would fill in the blanks.
Grandma doesn’t know much about “the cloud” either. She just snaps pictures—the pie she baked with you cooling on the windowsill, the old yellow mixing bowl she refuses to toss, Grandpa at the table, reading the paper like he always did. And she assumes those memories will be there tomorrow, even if hers are starting to slip away. That assumption rests on something solid—endless memory, backup power, and people whose job is to make sure nothing disappears.
Or take the mom who set up a Gmail account for her son before he was even born.
She attached the ultrasound photo—the first proof he was real. Later, she sent videos of him with spaghetti sauce on his face and, somehow, the wall behind him. His first day of kindergarten and his first scribbled ABCs. The day he walked across the graduation stage and didn’t look back. She pictured him reading those emails years later, discovering a version of himself he’d forgotten. Those messages existing beyond our existence isn’t magic, it requires human maintenance.
Your digital footprint needs a home. Most of us invest in a digital home without thinking. When your phone says storage is full and offers more space for $9.99 a month, you always pay, because deleting memories comes at a far greater cost.
Buried in thousands of photos is the last picture of your dog sleeping at the foot of your bed. The blurry video of your daughter practicing her wedding vows in the bathroom mirror. The voicemail from your dad, that always starts with, “Just checking in.”
People in the past weren’t so lucky. Their photos faded. But now we can save the ordinary things—and it turns out, the ordinary is everything.
Keeping memories safe needs something real. It needs infrastructure, and communities to host the machines storing our memories. Inside these buildings are wedding toasts, tax returns, retirement savings, grocery lists, and love letters—proof that a life was lived, and lived well. They are not watching us. They are working for us.
Citizens at your local meeting love to support libraries because they know what those shelves protect. These buildings deserve the same respect. They aren’t monuments to technology. They are monuments to us.
So the next time you pass one of those buildings and think it looks unimportant, remember: It’s not nothing. It’s your personal library.