This week, tens of millions of people will start downloading the same video game, and almost none of them will think about where it comes from. Grand Theft Auto VI is expected to be the biggest-grossing video game ever sold, and it has no disc. Buy it at GameStop, and the box holds only a printed code. Every copy travels from a data center, over the internet, to a console at home.
Here is the part that might surprise you: If you play in Colorado, your copy most likely comes from right here, inside the state.
The edge network
Colorado has more than 60 data centers, and you have probably driven past a dozen of them without noticing. They are the plain, windowless buildings around Denver, Aurora, Englewood, and Colorado Springs, and together they form something engineers call the edge network. The idea behind the edge network is easy to understand. Denver is where the Mountain West’s internet comes together, the crossroads where networks meet and swap traffic. Because the crossroads is here, companies keep copies of the things everybody wants–games, shows, apps, etc.–close to the people who want them.
Think of it the way a library system works. When a book is a bestseller, every branch stocks its own copies. Nobody drives downtown to borrow the one copy at the main library. The edge network is the Internet’s version of that.
GTA VI will be a bestseller. The game needs up to 212 gigabytes of storage, more room than a lot of laptops have altogether. It goes on sale Thursday, November 19, and downloading starts nine days early, on November 10, with Xbox players in Colorado able to begin at 5 p.m. on November 9. That head start is deliberate. The game’s publisher, Rockstar, knows what happens when millions of people reach for the same enormous file in the same hour, so copies are placed in data centers near players ahead of time, and downloading is spread across nine days and nights, much of it while people sleep.
And millions will reach for it. The last game in the series sold 11 million copies on its first day, thirteen years ago, when most games still came on discs. Forecasters expect this one to sell around 40 million copies in its first few months. On the first weekend, several million Americans will be playing at the same time on the same evening. The record for people playing one game at once is about 14 million. This launch has a real chance to test it.
So why won’t your internet slow to a crawl that week? Three plain reasons. The downloads are spread out over nine days instead of one bad hour. The file comes from down the road instead of across the country, so the big national routes stay clear. And the companies that run these delivery systems handle a rush like this every single night, when half the country sits down and presses play on a streaming show at the same time.
One local copy of the game can serve a whole city. The system was built for exactly this kind of night.
Making modern life work
It is also worth noticing this has nothing to do with artificial intelligence (AI). These days the words “data center” make people picture AI, but that’s a small slice of what these buildings actually do. Most of what runs inside them is ordinary life. Your streaming shows. Your bank balance. Your medical records. Your kid’s school portal. The card reader at the coffee shop. The biggest game ever made is about to be delivered by the same buildings, in the same way, for the same reason. Data centers are not an AI story. They are a modern life story, and building more of them is how modern life keeps working as the files get bigger and more of our lives move online.
Which raises a fair question: If we do not want these buildings, what do we want instead? Because computing demand does not go away. Before the big cloud companies existed, before AWS and Azure, every business of any size kept its own servers, and a lot of them kept those servers in a closet or a basement. Hot, loud, held together with hope, and down at the worst possible moment. That was the 1990s internet, and nobody who lived with it wants it back.
Do we really want server farms in basements again?
What changed is that computing moved out of the closet and into professional buildings, run by people who know what they are doing, close to the people they serve. That move has a name. It is a data center.
On November 19, the proof will be quiet, the way good infrastructure always is. No crash, no slowdown, no spinning wheel on the TV. Millions of people, including a good number here in Colorado, will simply start playing. The game will have gotten to them from a plain, windowless building a few miles away, one they have driven past a hundred times.
That building, and the sixty-some others like it across this state, are not the enemy of modern life. They are what makes it run.
Vanessa Rutledge is senior fellow in emerging technology at Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
