Fragility

In March 2021 a fire took hold in one of OVHcloud’s buildings in Strasbourg. SBG2 — the designation is the kind of thing you learn only in these circumstances — burned through the night and was destroyed. Several million websites went dark. What made it memorable was not the outage but its permanence: a number of customers discovered that their backups had been stored in the same complex, or in the building next door, and that when the fire brigade had finished there was simply nothing to restore from. Data that had been “in the cloud” had been in a shed in Alsace, and the shed had burned, and the data was gone in the way a warehouse of ledgers is gone. For a fortnight the trade press was full of people rediscovering, with visible surprise, that geography exists.

from The Ethics of AI Data Centres (2026)