RunAsRadio first introduced me to the topic of vast next-generation data centres being built near cheap renewable power and an Internet connectivity nexus whilst being provisioned, lego-brick-style, floors at a time.
Not server, by server. Not rack by rack; but rooms and floors at a time. Succinctly described by ZDnet here: Microsoft uses trucks to install its data centre servers.
It reminded me of a Presentation by James Hamilton a while ago about shipping containers as data centres - stacked like a port. All pre-fabricated by the supplier and when a certain threshold of hardware failure had been reached exchange with a replacement container.
Fascinating stuff. It is a category of IT that I am not personally involved in. I find it fascinating to see the evolution of a new super category of large-scale IT developing like utility firms for the era of utility and cloud computing. Just like, once upon a time, large industry would have had great furnaces powering huge plants and how that evolved to massive gigawatt nuclear power stations and grids powering many industries and dwarfing what seemed impressive once upon a time. So we now see the big enterprise data centres of the big corporations being dwarfed by the new utility (or rather: "Internet") scale grids heralded by the likes of Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc.
I can't see "Megastructures" doing an episode on this though because I can't imagine it capturing the imagination in quite the same way as the Beijing Olympic Stadium!