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A data center made rain
The air conditioning systems, the heat from the servers, and the ambient humidity combined to make the air inside foggy. Then the droplets collected and began to fall.
Data centers spend much of their electricity on cooling, and preventing weather like this is part of the reason. They also seal their electrical components with a lot of rubber sealing, literal raincoats for the machinery, because so much digital infrastructure now depends on the cloud.
The same year, more than half of people thought the data in the cloud was stored in an actual cloud in the sky. People were hearing about the cloud for the first time and guessed that it used the weather.
Why do data centers need so much cooling?
Servers turn almost all the electricity they draw into heat, and thousands of them in one building can overheat quickly if the air stops moving. Cooling systems pull that heat out and either blow chilled air across the racks or circulate liquid. ASHRAE, the engineering society for heating and cooling, recommends keeping server inlet air between 18 and 27 degrees Celsius.
How can air produce rain indoors?
Air can hold only so much water vapor, and the amount it holds drops as it cools. When humid air meets a surface or an air mass below its dew point, the vapor condenses into droplets. In a large hall where strong cooling and heat sources mix air of different temperatures, that can happen in open air and make fog. If the droplets cluster and grow, they fall. Dry air has its own problem, since low humidity raises the risk of static electricity, which can damage electronics.
How did computing end up called the cloud?
Engineers drew a cloud shape on network diagrams to stand for the parts of a network whose details did not matter, such as the internet. That symbol was common in telecommunications diagrams for decades. The phrase cloud computing took hold in the mid-2000s after Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006. Google's Eric Schmidt also used the phrase in a conference talk in August 2006.
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