Tiktok. Instagram. Facebook. Instagram. Whatsapp. Billions of people use these platforms daily to have fun or communicate. Not to mention the billions of financial, banking and business transactions that take place daily. But that cute kitten video on Tiktok or the dozens of selfies your neighbor uploads during his vacation require a place to store them - and those are chilling numbers : the amount of data created each year has skyrocketed like a Space X rocket, from 2 zettabytes in 2010 to 44 zettabytes in 2020. And what the heck is a zettabyte? It's 44 trillion (millions of millions of gigabytes).

It is to store these sidereal amounts of data that the famous data centers exist. And an analysis of where there are more data centers helps to explain several things. For example, it is natural that the United States is the country with the most data centers (measured by energy consumption) in the world. And they are not concentrated on the West Coast, as one might think, given California's prominence in the development of the digital economy and business. The data center capital of the world is Northern Virginia. Why Northern Virginia? For a combination of factors that include accessible land, low energy costs, a great communications infrastructure and, small detail, the proximity to Washington DC, the most important center of political and military power in the world. It should not be forgotten that the Internet was born more than 60 years ago as a collaborative project between the U.S. Department of Defense and leading universities.

Another curious fact: In which Latin American countries are there more data centers? Brazil -because of its size and the strong trend towards technology adoption among its companies and entrepreneurs- and Chile, where a good communications infrastructure and a stable economic and legal environment have made it a regional center for data storage.and Chile, where a good communications infrastructure and a stable economic and legal environment have made it a regional data storage center.

You can see here the map of the world's data centers, according to Visualcapitalist: