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As servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft's $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts. As a result, finding a site for a large data centre is now, above all, about securing a cheap and reliable source of power, says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, a website that chronicles the boom in data-centre construction.

Such sites are in short supply in America, however. And with demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground, for security and to protect the natural landscape.

So will all data centres end up in remote places like Quincy or Iceland? Not necessarily. For many applications, speed is of the essence. To make sure that its web-search results show up almost instantly, Google has to distribute its data centres around the world. Financial-services firms want to have access to trading data in real time, which explains the high density of data centres near New York and London. And fast-moving online games must be hosted near their players.

Even when speed does not matter, many firms want their servers close by, says Mike Foust, the boss of Digital Realty Trust, which builds and rents out data centres. Sometimes this is for maintenance; sometimes it is because “server huggers” do not want to let go. Security also counts. The Boyd Company, which advises companies about where to put their data centres, thinks more should be built in the provinces. Demand for secure locations for back-up centres, which many firms now have to maintain, will give rise to huge regional data centres, such as the one being built in Newport in Wales.

In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.