This article originally appeared on Motherboard Netherlands.

People sometimes forget that the internet isn't an elusive cloud in the sky. It's anchored in the ground by an infrastructure of cables and data centers. It's in these data centers where everything from your sensitive banking transactions to silly memes are hosted, and that businesses like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Netflix spend hundreds of millions of dollars building across the world. Anything and everything that has to do with the internet is processed in these centers.