Data Mine: Google's search-engine superiority is powered in part by a billion-dollar data center in Lenoir.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: PICTURE THIS

Google Inc. doesn't relinquish many of its data centers' secrets, but it has revealed some. Others have leaked out. The tech giant's big-data dozen handle more than 3 billion "googles" a day, their servers responding 200,000 times faster than a home Internet connection. "Capital of North C ... ," someone types," ... Raleigh," they answer. A desktop computer stores about a terabyte of data. There are 1,024 terabytes in a petabyte. A petabyte of songs would play for more than 2000 years on an MP3 player. The combined memory of Google's data centers is measured in petaflops, one of which equals 1 quadrillion calculations per second. That's 15 zeros.

In 2007, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google built a $600 million data center in Lenoir--for which it could get more than $260 million in tax incentives over 30 years--and doubled its investment at the 215-acre property last year. It was not one of the city's top 20 employers last fiscal year, according to Lenoir's annual report, but it has about 150 workers who mend and care for about 50,000 servers. They aren't the most advanced--the Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China can handle 33.9 petaflops--but their muscle comes via teamwork. They are strung together, a tactic called commodity computing, to increase power exponentially while managing costs incrementally.

So much thinking makes even servers burn. That's why much of the investment in the Lenoir data center isn't in computers. Miles of pipes connecting valves, water tanks, cooling towers and condensers work together to keep the servers comfortably cool. The company won't reveal how much electricity the center...