What's Actually Inside a Data Center? A Rare Camera Tour

Most Americans have strong opinions about data centers; almost none have been inside one. Scripps News got rare camera access to Digital Realty's Dallas campus, 1.3 million square feet of server halls behind turnstiles, badge swipes, and biometric scans, to show what these facilities actually do: route and process billions of requests every second, every time someone streams a show, pays for groceries, or queries a chatbot.

The piece also explains a distinction that matters in Florida's debate: this is a colocation facility, where many companies rent space in shared infrastructure, the model behind most of Florida's existing data centers, and a very different animal from the gigawatt-scale AI campuses making national headlines.

Attribution: Reported by Scripps News, February 2026.

Watch the full video tour → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFmxZWb27VM

Read the companion story → https://www.scrippsnews.com/science-and-tech/inside-the-secretive-data-centers-powering-the-ai-boom