• Question: How does Google uses around 0.013% of the world’s energy becaause we thought that it was just a medium which we use as part of the internet?

    Asked by Chasmine <3 to Stevie, Sandra, Liena, Dona, Andrew on 8 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Andrew Allan

      Andrew Allan answered on 8 Nov 2015:

      This is a really interesting question. Google has things called ‘data centres’ all over the world – these store information and process the questions you ask google. They are a bit like computers without screens! These data centers use electricity.

      I hadn’t heard this statistic before, so I did some further research. Google also says that for all the energy it uses, it also buys and invests in renewable energy and carbon offsetting – which means it’s carbon footprint is zero.

    • Photo: Steven Wray

      Steven Wray answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      Andrew is spot on! These data centres are what you may have heard called servers before. Your school probably has some servers that keep their IT system going, but Google’s servers are moving and storing data around for millions of customers instead of a few hundred people. So I’m sure as you can imagine; they’re really big. Find out how big your server room is at school and then imagine 100,000 of them!

      They have 14 data centres around the world in various countries, so each one of their data centres is probably about 7,000 times bigger than your school’s server.

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