How Many Costcos Does It Take to Run the Internet?
Introducing the CUPS Metric: Costco Units of Processing Space
Just over a decade ago we described compute capability for the non-technical by how many iPhones strung together would equal a petaflop of supercomputing power. Today we make our noble comparisons to warehouse-scale bulk shopping meccas.
But let’s actually talk about this new measure we will define as a Costco Unit of Processing Space (CUPS).
On a serious note, why Costco? Because no one has any clue what 10 million square feet of server racks looks like.But everyone has wandered through a Costco at least once, under the flickering hum, staggering past pallets of peanut butter ruminating on peak civilization.
Now, imagine 31 of them. That’s the size of Project Cardinal, a proposed data center campus in Yorkville, Illinois. A thousand acres of flat, Midwestern farmland soon to be replaced by 17 million square feet of server racks, power substations, and a sea of parking spaces where 3,750 cars can sit and broil in the Illinois sun. That’s 116 CUPS—116 Costcos of server farms and cooling ducts, a sprawling desert of blinking lights and cable trays as far as the eye can see.
But that’s just one site.
To really understand how big the world’s datacenters have gotten, we need to take the CUPS global.
Let’s start in China. The Hohhot Data Center in Inner Mongolia is the kind of behemoth you’d expect to see in a dystopian sci-fi novel—the place where the last remaining servers run the simulation that keeps the lights on for everyone else.
Spanning 10.7 million square feet, it’s a brutalist expanse of steel and silicon that consumes 73 CUPS in a single shot. And what does it serve? Telecoms. Streaming platforms. The vast invisible machinery of the Chinese internet, quietly sucking megawatts and spitting out content to a billion devices.
Meanwhile, over in Nevada, the Citadel Campus is a fortress of compute coverinh 7.2 million square feet, or 49 CUPS, enough to store every TikTok ever posted and all the surveillance footage from the Las Vegas strip, twice. It’s where your data goes to hide in plain sight, encrypted and cross-hatched across racks of SSDs and cold storage bays, all cooled by one of the most sophisticated air-to-water systems ever engineered in a desert. It’s the size of a small town, but it runs like a mainframe—an assembly line for data where the product isn’t widgets, it’s petabytes.
And then there’s Meta’s AI megaplex in Holly Ridge, Louisiana, a relatively modest 4 million square feet, or 27 CUPS. But here’s the twist: it consumes 15% of Louisiana’s total electrical grid.
You can power every air conditioner in Baton Rouge or run Meta’s AI farm. But not both. And at peak capacity, it hums like a thousand laundromats spinning at once, each load of towels as heavy as a training set for a large language model that can’t stop hallucinating mid-sentence.
That’s the thing about CUPS—they’re not just a measure of space. They’re a measure of load, of how much grid you can eat in one gulp.
Take Switch’s Citadel Campus again. Those 49 CUPS aren’t just square footage—they’re also 130 megawatts of power. That’s the electrical draw of a small city, routed through racks of high-performance GPUs, all of them cranking through neural networks that generate faces that don’t exist, sentences that never end, and ads that follow you like a stalker with good SEO.
And that’s just the hyperscalers. If we count every operator globally—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and the lesser-known colos that keep the internet’s plumbing intact—we’re looking at an estimated 2,500 CUPS worldwide. That’s 365 million square feet of server racks, cooling loops, and diesel generators. A Costco for every day of the year. And that’s just the stuff we know about.
Because it’s not just the big names anymore. It’s the crypto mines in Kazakhstan, the AI inference farms in the Pacific Northwest, the edge servers stuffed into abandoned Walmarts and old Sears outlets. It’s the pop-up data centers, the containerized racks that roll up like food trucks and burn through diesel while you sleep. It’s the disaster recovery sites, the off-grid bunkers, the cold storage archives where everything from your high school selfies to old crime scene footage goes to hibernate.
Which brings us back to Yorkville. Project Cardinal isn’t just another warehouse full of servers. It’s a node—one more Costco-sized cog in a planetary grid of invisible infrastructure, all of it running 24/7 to store the endless scroll of data we generate without thinking. It’s 116 CUPS of cloud capacity, a single cell in a digital organism that’s growing faster than anyone can count.
And if you think Yorkville’s big, just wait until they break ground on the next one. Because the Costco Unit of Processing Space (CUPS) isn’t going away. It’s just getting taller, louder, and more impossible to ignore.
