LONDON—Outside, it's about 35 degrees Celsius (95F) and close to 100 percent humidity. Hat-wearing tennis lovers fan themselves with genteelly flailing limbs, or whatever else they have to hand, while they sip on a cup of Pimm's. Down here, though, away from the punishing sun and thronging crowds, I'm bathed in the soothing susurration of servers (of the computer variety), and—more importantly—some really powerful air conditioning.

I'm standing in the operations bunker of the Wimbledon tennis championships, a couple of deep-underground rooms stuffed with IBM engineers and hardware. This is where all of the data—some 3.2 million new data points per championships—is processed by Watson and other big data technologies, for use by the commentators, the TV and Internet video feeds, and on the Wimbledon.com website and apps.

Upstairs, there are two or three people watching every tennis game—46 people in total. On the smaller courts, there are just two people: one to watch the action and call out the action, and one who inputs the data into a laptop. On the larger courts, there's a third person who manages extra data sources that aren't available on the smaller courts, such as the speed of the serves. There are also two people in the bunker who can correct erroneous calls, or fill in if there's a technical issue upstairs.

Ultimately, all of this data is fed into a variety of computers and servers in the bunker, but the bulk of the processing appears to be offloaded to three external IBM data centres; two in the US, and one in the UK, in Portsmouth.

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony



Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian Anthony

The bunker is comprised of two rooms. The first room appears to focus on lower-level details, such as making sure all of the data coming into the system is accurate, and that all systems are operating correctly. For example, there is a screen that shows the status of every IBM data-gathering device at the championships. Each device (which could be a court-side data-entry laptop, or a security scanner placed at one of the gates) is represented by a small box on a giant map of the whole Wimbledon site: if the box is green, it's working as expected, if it's red then it's turned off or broken.

The next room is where slightly higher-level, operational stuff occurs. There is a laptop that's broadcasting a live video feed of the spectators at Henman Hill, which is available 24/7 from Wimbledon.com or one of the mobile apps. (Actually, there were two identical MacBooks both streaming the same feed. "It's for redundancy," said the engineer sitting by them.) In the corner of the room, with no less than six displays, there was one programmer who looked particularly harried: his job was to take the raw data feeds from the first room and convert them into usable XML for with some fancy style sheets.

One computer in this second room had access to a Watson-like interface (see the gallery above), where you could pose tennis-related questions—"what time does Wimbledon open?"— and get informative answers back. For now, it has fairly limited access to Wimbledon's massive, 100-year-old database of facts and figures. Eventually, the plan is to have a Watson interface that can be interrogated by commentators, to dig up all sorts of interesting factoids, along with any relevant context.

The second room also had a couple of guys at the back who were in charge of collecting and editing photos, for use on Wimbledon.com and elsewhere on the Internet. There are photographers on every court who upload photos to a central server via Wi-Fi. The two guys in the bunker pick the best photos, edit them in Photoshop, and then pass them along to the production team (which sits in another room). It was a pretty impressive stream of photos; new ones would pop up every couple of seconds.

A quick tour of the IBM bunker at the Wimbledon Championships 2015. Video produced by Jennifer Hahn.

One of the more interesting aspects of the IBM bunker is that it's completely temporary: once the tournament is over, IBM packs up and heads home. There was a big server in the first room, and a large patch panel in the second room, but other than that, everyone was using a laptop (either a ThinkPad or some kind of Mac). In the first room, there's a storage unit with 12 ThinkPads stacked closely together, all cracked open just a couple of inches (pictured in the gallery above).Their purpose? To drive the various displays and projectors dotted around the room. "They have powerful graphics cards," our guide said.

In the future, as IBM gathers even more data, and works out how to assess subjective qualities such as "aggressive play," the bunker will provide further insight into the tennis being played, but also about the physical site itself, the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club.

I asked one engineer about whether they can track spectators as they move around the club—data that could theoretically be used to improve security, access to amenities (bathrooms, food stalls), and myriad other applications. He said that they already do some basic flow analysis using CCTV cameras to see which parts of the club are busy, mostly to aid emergency services, but they're looking at other techniques that will be far more accurate. For example, the engineer told me that Wimbledon and IBM are talking to the mobile phone networks, to get access to triangulated location data from nearby base stations. Other options include Bluetooth beacons, or better tracking software plugged into high-res CCTV cameras.

Another contentious topic is data originating from the tennis players themselves. Right now, Hawk-Eye is used on Centre Court and No. 1 Court, which can gather some data about the ball and the movements of the players, but what we really need is sensors on the players and in their tennis rackets. IBM told us that some players are putting sensors in their rackets, but so far the data has been for private use only. The players, of course, don't want to give away all of their secrets.