Last week your UP team had a day-long field trip touring a giant data center near Dulles Airport in Loudoun County Virginia.

Many people don’t realize that without these massive data centers, which have somehow been demonized by everyone across the political spectrum from Elizabeth Warren to Steve Bannon, there is no Internet, no data storage (all the photos, music, etc. on our devices), no IPhone apps, no GPS, no missile defense, no Uber, and no Amazon deliveries.

Worst of all: there is no HOTLINE!!! Your mornings are ruined – to say nothing of the rest of the day.

Just a quick takeaway.

These data centers are multi-billion dollar industrial and engineering marvels. They ARE the central nervous system of our future communications and commerce.  The speed and efficiency of these operations is mindboggling. Picture a telephone switchboard operator in the 1950s connecting calls manually.  Data centers are doing billions of transactions and computations across the country sought by tens of millions of users every minute.