Some New Data Centers Are Necessary is a New Yorker Daily Humor cartoon by Matilda Borgström, not a report about a planned computing facility. The page shows two men standing in front of a data center and gives the following caption: “This data center is set aside for storing accidental screenshots of your phone’s home screen.”
The title can read like a claim about infrastructure until the image and caption supply the joke. The New Yorker credits Borgström as the cartoonist and places the work in its Daily Humor section.
Who made the Some New Data Centers Are Necessary cartoon?
Matilda Borgström made the cartoon. Readers looking for the work can find it on The New Yorker’s cartoon page, where the title, image, byline and caption appear together.
The gag appears to pair the industrial scale suggested by a data center with a mundane phone mistake. That is a reading of the cartoon, not a statement of Borgström’s intent. The published page does not offer an explanation from the cartoonist.
A data center, in the ordinary technical sense, is a facility that keeps servers, storage and networking gear running for digital services. For the mechanics behind the term, see Kernel’s guide to how a data center works. Borgström’s cartoon uses that familiar setting as the premise for a deliberately excessive fictional allocation of computing space.
There is no factual claim in the cartoon that a facility has been built, proposed or reserved for phone screenshots. It is a single-panel humor work whose searchable title is easy to confuse with an infrastructure headline.
This story draws on original reporting from The New Yorker.
