The Columbia: Where the Internet Live

Part of the History Lecture Series: River Histories. An artery of indigenous commerce, a nexus of the fur trade, a power source for war work, and a water source for industrial-scale agriculture, the mighty Columbia is now home to one of the world’s most notable concentrations of data centers. These enormous facilities, owned and operated by the world’s largest technology companies, are the physical backbone that make cloud computing, social networking, and AI possible.