Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, commercialising on-demand, metered access to compute and storage that businesses could rent by the hour rather than owning servers, and Microsoft Azure (2010) and Google Cloud soon followed. The model concentrated digital infrastructure into vast hyperscale data centres, each housing tens of thousands of servers and drawing very large amounts of electricity and cooling water. Software, services and data migrated off local machines into these remote facilities. A handful of operators came to underpin much of the world's online activity.
It became the back-end of platform urbanism, hosting the apps, sensors and analytics that mediate city life. Data-centre siting, land take, water use and electricity demand have in turn emerged as a new land-use and grid pressure on city-regions.