What Is a Data Center?
Data centers are physical facilities that house the computing equipment behind cloud services, digital applications and artificial intelligence. Understanding what they contain and do is the starting point for understanding their demands on electricity, cooling and infrastructure.
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What This Graphic Shows
A data center is a physical facility that houses computing equipment – typically servers, data-storage systems, and networking equipment – along with supporting infrastructure such as electrical and cooling systems.
Data centers store, process, manage and exchange digital information. They provide infrastructure for services people and businesses use every day, including cloud computing, websites, online storage, business applications, and other digital services.
Artificial intelligence is one increasingly important source of demand for data-center computing capacity, but data centers and AI are not the same thing. AI workloads run in data centers alongside many other types of computing.
That distinction matters because the electricity, cooling, water, and infrastructure demands of a particular data center depend partly on what computing equipment it contains, what workloads it performs, and the scale at which it operates.
Key Takeaway
A data center is physical infrastructure for computing. AI is one increasingly important use – not the definition of a data center.
Verification Status:
Verified — Current
Last Verified:
September 13, 2026
Sources
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Computer Server Selection Guidelines for Energy Efficiency and Decarbonization in Data Centers
The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing
How Researchers Are Driving Advances for Data Centers
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