Location of google servers
But… that’s only the core data centers. These actually store user data, and do such things as index the internet.
There are also Edge PoPs, which contain just frontend servers. These essentially run the things that have to be close to users because they have frequent interactions with user devices:
The machines used in core and edge DCs are Google custom hardware, although basically they’re big PC servers.
And then there’s Google Global Cache nodes, which store public static content. Basically that’s the popular videos on youtube, images, and javascript resource files:
As you can see, there’s more than likely one of those somewhere within a few hundred kilometers of you. These are installed in ISP facilities. Many of them are quite old machines, they have a longer life cycle than the others. These are off the shelf servers, mostly made by Dell.
Don’t let the number of locations fool you, the GGC and Edge facilities have about the same number of machines as the core data centers, and the machines are slower on the edge, so the vast majority of Google’s computing resources are in the core DCs.
So, where are Google’s servers? Just about everywhere. But most of them are in those 15 core DC locations.