Our online lives may seem ethereal and detached from the real world, but not to Jon Tibbitts. He sees the brain and body of the internet every day in downtown Atlanta.

Computer servers and electricity converters buzz like neurons. Cooling fans breathe as if they were lungs. Hundreds of miles of cables act as a sprawling digital nervous system.

It all takes place within a century-old building off Marietta Street that Tibbitts oversees for his employer, Digital Realty . It’s one of the most interconnected data centers of its kind in the country and acts as the beating heart of Atlanta’s digital ecosystem.

“Look up there,” said Tibbitts, the operations manager at the facility called 56 Marietta . Pointing to a cluster of cables more than a foot in diameter, he exclaimed, “That’s what m

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