Every letter or number you type online takes up approximately one byte of storage in the cloud. And all your tweets, emails, and other assorted pieces of data end up being stored in vast centers requiring unfathomable amounts of energy. The New York Times investigated the huge amounts of power that go into the sprawling server farms that backup your emails, Dropbox, Pinterest, and everything Google, all of which require equally massive and expensive cooling systems to keep them humming along. Here, a brief look at the eye-popping numbers:

Bytes used to store a single letter or number

Gigabytes required to store for one billion bytes of information

Gigabytes used by a "data-intensive customer" who stored a lot of data in server farms 10 years ago

1 million

Gigabytes of data produced each day by the New York Stock Exchange

30 billion

76 billion

300 million
Average watts of power consumed by Google's data centers, according to a recent disclosure that didn't specify a timeframe

60 million
Average watts of power consumed by Facebook's data centers, also according to the recent disclosure

Percentage of total electricity used that is wasted by these data centers, says The New York Times, which, "by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner" because they run at maximum capacity "around the clock, whatever the demand." In many instances, these data centers pull in more electricity than a "medium-sized town," says Eric Limer at Gizmodo.

6 to 12

Federal data centers owned by the government in 1998

Federal data centers owned by the government in in 2010

Homes that could be powered by backup diesel gas-powered generators that data centers sometimes use if there's an outage

Air quality regulations cited to Amazon over a three-year period in Northern Virginia, allegedly for using said diesel generators without obtaining proper environmental permits first

500 million
Watts of electricity most data centers in Northern Virginia now consume

1 billion
Watts of electricity these same data centers could be consuming by 2017

Read the entire article at The New York Times.

Sources: The New York Times, Forbes, Gizmodo