Digital Cathedrals

A mini-sized book that packs a mega-sized wallop of eye-popping, must-know Information and analyses about the new digital age. The saying ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’ doesn’t begin to capture the astounding things to come.

Steve Forbes, Chairman, Editor-in-Chief, Forbes Media

We are now witnessing the build-out of society’s first foundationally new infrastructure in nearly a century: the Cloud. It is an ecosystem of information-digital hardware, at the heart of which resides massive warehouse-scale datacenters unlike anything ever built. Given the resources committed to them and the reverence afforded to the companies that build and own them, datacenters might be called the digital cathedrals of the twenty-first century. The emerging Cloud is as different from the communications infrastructure that preceded it, as air travel was different from automobiles. And, using energy as a metric for scale―since there are only two kinds of infrastructures, energy-producing and energy-using―today’s global Cloud already consumes more energy than all aviation. Yet, as disruptive as the Cloud has already become, we are in fact just at the end of the beginning of what the digital masons are building for the twenty-first century.

“A mini-sized book that packs a mega-sized wallop of eye-popping, must-know Information and analyses about the new digital age. The saying ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’ doesn’t begin to capture the astounding things to come.” —Steve Forbes, Chairman, Editor-in-Chief, Forbes Media

“This pithy book will give you lots of useful benchmarks. . . you are in for a crash course in reality. If the numbers surprise you, check them: it will be educational. But also absorb them, because that’s where the world is going.” —Julio Ottino, Dean McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University

“Digital Cathedrals is the essential book of the 2020s, a decade that will trigger convulsive change to the structures of the global economy. . . you will be fully awakened to the business and investing possibilities after reading Mark Mills’s masterpiece. No company leader or investor can afford to miss Digital Cathedrals.” —Rich Karlgaard, Publisher, Forbes, Author, Late Bloomers

Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a faculty fellow with the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and a strategic partner in a tech venture fund.