This is where Google stores your photos and emails

In an essay about the future of Google, co-founder Sergey Brin shared a picture of where Google stores your emails and photos.

Google used to be notoriously secretive about its data centers and the custom hardware it designs and uses in them. And it still doesn't talk in detail about much of that stuff.

But in the past year, as companies like Facebook and Microsoft have talked about all the new tech they've invented for data centers, particularly tech that makes them greener, consuming less energy, so, too, has Google begun to show off its state-of the art facilities.

Below is the picture Brin used showing off the racks and racks of servers and computer storage Google uses to store your emails and photos.

Google

And this is what Brin said about them:

Advances also made it possible to provide enterprise class email, featuring vast storage and search capabilities, to anyone in the world - for free; that's why we created Gmail. And, if you fast-forward to today, we recently harnessed continued improvements in storage cost and machine learning to create Google Photos, which lets everyone in the world safely keep, and search through, a lifetime of photos and videos.