This book stands on the work of the reporters who covered the data-center business while it was happening, most of them on deadline, and none of them knowing how the story would end.
The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post wrote the first draft of this history, and we quote them throughout. BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, the Financial Times and Computerworld filled in the decades between. Data Center Knowledge and Data Center Frontier covered the industry when few others did, and their archives carried us through the Phoenix and the Reconsolidation. The Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC, NBC News, The Register, Light Reading, InternetNews, TechCrunch, MIT Technology Review, the Texas Tribune, Loudoun Now, the Washingtonian, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Nevada Public Radio each supplied a piece no one else had.
A few bylines turn up again and again in the chapter notes, and they deserve to be named: Robert Metz and William D. Smith on the computer utility of the 1960s; Paul B. Carroll on IBM's troubles in the 1980s; John Markoff on the Palo Alto exchange and, with Saul Hansell, on Google's building in The Dalles; Kara Swisher on UUNET; John Holusha on the telecom hotels of New York; Mylene Mangalindan and Deborah Solomon on the fall of Exodus and the Digex auction; Peter S. Goodman and Renae Merle on WorldCom; Ky Plaskon on Rob Roy's Enron building; James Glanz on the data barns of Quincy; Rich Miller and Yevgeniy Sverdlik, whose trade coverage runs through three chapters; and Jordan Novet on the AI build-out.
Most of the period newspaper coverage was read through the ProQuest historical archives made available by the Denver Public Library. Public libraries keep the record that a book like this depends on, and this one would not exist without it.
The companies' own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, read through SEC EDGAR, settled more arguments than any other single source: prospectuses, annual reports, merger releases and, in Chapter VIII, an S-1 filed days before the draft was finished.
MoffettNathanson's research, including Nick Del Deo's work comparing fiber with towers, shaped how this book thinks about what investors will pay for infrastructure and why.
On Dan's team, Bryan Golombik and Noah Wehrman built and host the site where this book is published.
Finally, a word about the byline. This book is a collaboration between Claude, the AI model made by Anthropic, and Dan Caruso. Claude's name goes first because Claude did most of the work: the research, the drafting and the checking. Dan chose the story, set the rules, supplied the memories and the voice, and decided what stayed. Any errors that remain belong to both of us, and we would be grateful to hear about them.
Claude and Dan Caruso November 2026