The Building That Runs the Cloud
Sources, by chapter
Linked references for the book’s reporting, research and observed work.
Sources from the finished book, grouped by chapter. Publication dates are shown where supplied; undated technical documentation is identified as such. A publisher may require a subscription to read its report.
Chapter 1 / Less room for error
9. Typical rack density and high-density peaks.
Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2026, July 24, 2026
Back to chapter10. Hybrid air and liquid cooling in an AI rack system.
NVIDIA, Key Components of the DGX SuperPOD · Documentation accessed October 10, 2026
Back to chapter11. Leak detection, flow, pressure and temperature measurements.
NVIDIA, Mission Control Software Administration Manual, section 12 · Documentation accessed October 10, 2026
Back to chapter12. How the rack and building cooling loops connect.
NVIDIA, Maximizing AI Factory Performance per Watt with NVIDIA DSX MaxLPS · August 24, 2026
Back to chapterChapter 2 / Ten hours without a trade
1. CME trading halt after a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, with markets affected across currencies, Treasuries, commodities and stocks.
Back to chapter2. CyrusOne statement that its CHI1 facility experienced a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units on November 27, 2025.
TechRepublic, December 1, 2025
Back to chapter3. Outage of more than ten hours, temperatures above 100°F, CME's decision not to switch to its New York area backup site, and CyrusOne bolstering backup cooling.
Bloomberg via Insurance Journal, December 1, 2025
Back to chapter4. Location of the data center complex in Aurora, Illinois, and its redundancy and free cooling design.
Back to chapterChapter 3 / When the cloud goes dark
13. IDC Frontier's third report: time of the attack, the four affected zones, 495 customers, data recovery only from customer backups, consoles stopped in other regions, intrusion path under investigation.
IDC Frontier, third report, October 8, 2026 (Japanese)
Back to chapter14. Ransomware confirmed in East Japan Region 1; IDC Frontier is a SoftBank Group subsidiary; the attacker's claim of a seven-minute breach.
BleepingComputer, October 2026
Back to chapter15. Ibaraki Prefecture and prefectural police websites, the NETSEA marketplace, and Six Apart's affected servers.
iThome, October 2026 (Traditional Chinese)
Back to chapter16. Six Apart's 31 affected servers and stopped inventory and price-update services.
Impress Watch, October 8, 2026 (Japanese)
Back to chapter17. Six Apart keeps seven daily backups of every server on Google Cloud, separate from IDCF Cloud.
Six Apart, second report, October 8, 2026 (Japanese)
Back to chapter18. Six Apart restored from its 1:00 a.m. October 7 backup and moved all 31 servers to Sakura Cloud by 9:00 p.m. October 8.
Six Apart, third report, October 9, 2026 (Japanese)
Back to chapterChapter 4 / The controls outside the firewall
5. About 6,300 high-confidence internet-accessible ICS and BAS devices within one kilometer of 1,063 U.S. data centers, protocol mix, facility age findings, and study limits.
TrendAI Research, "An Invisible Attack Surface," 2026
Back to chapter6. 548 exposed building automation devices running end-of-life products.
Back to chapterChapters 7 and 10 / Uptime and cost
7. Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages; failure to follow procedures leads human error outages; outage cost findings from the 2025 survey.
Uptime Institute, Annual Outage Analysis 2026, May 13, 2026
Back to chapter Back to chapterChapter 8 / NetOps IQ observations
8. HVAC demonstration and water site pilot results come from NetOps IQ's own work, with customer details removed.
NetOps IQ: controlled demonstration and pilot context
Back to chapterThe power-generation camera test described in Chapter 8 is an authorized test in a different industry. Read its scope and results. None of these observations is a data-center pilot.