The cloud is one of the greatest collective illusions of our time. It does not exist the way many people imagine.
When you send a file “to the cloud”, it does not go off into an “immaterial cloud”.
It travels through fibre-optic cables, crosses data centres and passes through physical equipment that consumes electricity, produces heat and takes up square metres.
This reminder seems obvious. Yet it gives you a different perspective when you read the announcements currently saturating the media.
Billions invested in new data centres, AI capacity announced with great fanfare in press releases: it all seems positive!
Except that between the announcement and reality, there is a concrete problem nobody mentions: energy.
Grid connection requests from new data centres now far exceed the capacity available in France.
Many announcements will never materialise, and in any case we could not power them all in time.
But very quickly, a second problem emerges: fibre.
Deploying a data centre also means rolling out tens, sometimes hundreds of kilometres of optical fibre to connect it to the rest of the Internet.
And once connected, the customers in these data centres need optimised routes to interconnect efficiently. That is exactly where peering comes in.
A subject very close to our hearts at France-IX.
So yes, the cloud makes many people dream, but in reality, it is the infrastructure running it that makes it possible.
Why peering?
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