At the corner of 48th Street and Santa Fe Avenue in industrial Vernon, a three-story building looms large among rumbling factories and warehouses. Long, vertical, tinted windows with green outlines punctuate the two-acre structure’s grey and white facade–all in the service of keeping its tenants cool inside. Its tenants aren’t people, but giant servers, storage drives and networking equipment.

Data centers like Prime Data Center in Vernon have been popping up all over the country, fueled by the tech industry’s insatiable need for cloud computing services that allow them to host and process enormous amounts of information. Los Angeles has been no exception. There are 71 data centers scattered across the county, according to the industry site Data Center Map. Vernon, a 5-square-mile chunk o

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