New York City caches almost all the Internet data the city accesses regularly in a few local data centers in the city itself, the biggest being 60 Hudson Street, in lower Manhattan.
60 Hudson is the former Western Union Building, built in the 1930s before telephones were a big deal. And because the building is so massive, girls on roller skates would relay paper telegraphs from one side of the building to the other to retransmit the message.
But today's high expense of storing data for instant access means a huge amount of traffic needed to serve NYC's needs is farmed out to data centers in Quebec. Why so far? Well, the huge expense of cooling down the servers is mitigated by very cold water piped down from northern Quebec.
For example, Google and Microsoft have big data farms in Quebec to manage data needed in New York real-time (a few seconds), but NOT hard real-time.
So in the future, don't be surprised to find out the power requirements of big data provider data centers — serving metropolitan New York — might be supplied (or backed up) by Fort Drum's reactor.
It’s not only that cooling costs are lower, it’s also that Quebec Hydro has very low-cost electricity.