The Tech Giants’ Invisible Helpers

Google, Facebook, Amazon and other big American tech companies collectively spend tens of billions of dollars each year on things like massive warehouses of computer and internet equipment that let them speed along your Instagram posts and home shopping purchases. You might have driven by some of these computing centers and never noticed them. But the tech giants’ efforts to make these boring workhorses more efficient and effective is one of the most important advancements in technology in the last decade. Increasingly lining the world’s oceans are undersea cables that are partly or entirely funded by internet companies and are essential cogs in the internet. We tend to focus on tech companies’ dominance over parts of the internet we can see, like search engines and social media sites. But the superpowers’ command of the invisible infrastructure of the digital world gives them an untouchable advantage. The boring stuff turns out to be incredibly important.