This is going to sound hard to believe but the granddaddy of all data centers was first built way back in 1946 by the US military. This ‘old school’ data center had the easily pronounceable name of, ‘Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer’, ENIAC for short (thank goodness for acronyms). Perhaps even harder to believe but the US Army used Uncle Sam’s ENIAC for storing defense codes back in the early days of the cold war. Commercial data centers as we know them today are a considerably different beast. It’s probably fair to mention that the boom in data centers really occurred post 9/11, fuelled by concerns about safely backing up business critical information. However, it was the likes of Google, Facebook and big tech that really drove up the scale of data centers around the world. Experts estimate that the average commercial life of a data center is anywhere between 10 to15 years. However, most data centers today are signing up for 25-year leases on their properties. Over that 25-year period a data center will tend to replace its computer hardware (IT network equipment, data storage and servers) every 3 to 5 years. The data center infrastructure (racks, cooling & power hardware) is usually refreshed every 8 to 10 years. This means that a data center will decommission its equipment at least 5 times and its main infrastructure 2 to 3 times during its entire life cycle.