The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid—a distributed system of 2 billion gigabytes of storage across over 40 countries—manages data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

On average, the Large Hadron Collider uses 1.3 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—equivalent to about 124,000 US homes—generated by a French substation.

The total length of superconducting wire at the Large Hadron Collider spans about 250,000 kilometers (155,000 miles)—enough to wrap around the equator 6.2 times.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest cryogenic system, which uses 10,000 metric tons of liquid nitrogen and 120 metric tons of helium to cool 36,000 metric tons of magnets to temperatures colder than outer space.

Take a 360-degree tour of ATLAS, one of two general-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider and the largest particle detector by volume ever built. (VR device-compatible)

Watch an animated visualization of how the Large Hadron Collider works, including how particles are accelerated through a series of machines and how collision data is collected and distributed worldwide.

CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, with the Large Hadron Collider serving as its largest tool.

The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider will provide a tenfold increase in particle collisions compared with the initial LHC infrastructure by increasing the number of ions in collision bundles and by concentrating the ion beams.

Each year, the Large Hadron Collider undergoes a winter shutdown—when electricity costs are highest—and bringing it back online requires weeks of tests, including some involving high-energy particles from outer space.

Although built from 1996 to 2008, the Large Hadron Collider relies on accelerators built starting in 1954 to help bring protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light—about 2.73 million football fields per second.

Learn about five of the largest particle accelerators on Earth, which, as of 2026, are led by the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

At the CERN Control Center, where the Large Hadron Collider and connected accelerators are managed, champagne bottles from parties commemorating major milestones, such as the first collisions or a new record energy, are collected.

Through 2038, the Large Hadron Collider research program is expected to generate societal benefits of €25.6B, or €3.3B more than operating costs and investments.

At the Large Hadron Collider, protons are accelerated so close to the speed of light that they would lag behind a laser by just 10 feet after 14 minutes of travel.

The Large Hadron Collider repurposed an excavation tunnel built for the Large Electron-Positron Collider, which was used until 2000 and whose construction involved the largest civil engineering project in Europe before the Channel Tunnel.

Since 2026, the Large Hadron Collider has provided heat to thousands of French homes and businesses through a system that harnesses hot water from the accelerator's cooling circuits.

Despite fears of creating black holes, the Large Hadron Collider produces collisions with energies of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, about one million times smaller than the energy needed to create the lightest possible black holes.

Throughout its 10-year mission to create a time-lapse of the universe, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will generate 500 petabytes of data by taking an ultrawide, ultra-high definition image every 34 seconds.

Unlike the other major detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, the Compact Muon Solenoid—one of two general-purpose detectors—was built above ground and then lowered underground in sections for reassembly.

DNA computing allows for storage and processing of massive amounts of data

Although costly and less efficient for simpler tasks, as of 2025, DNA could hold 455 exabytes of data with near limitless parallel computation potential in small data centers. Every movie ever made would fit inside the volume of a single sugar cube.

The first circular particle accelerator was narrower than the average cereal bowl

The 1939 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Ernest Lawrence for inventing the cyclotron. By comparison, the Large Hadron Collider is 5 miles in diameter and is the largest cryogenic system in the world, cooling its electromagnets to temperatures colder than those found in outer space.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

As of 2026, 75 of the 86 particles discovered by the Large Hadron Collider have been found by the LHCb experiment—a detector that explores the decay of particles made of beauty and charm quarks.

Take a virtual tour inside the NVIDIA GA102 graphics processing unit to explore the architecture that enables it to perform over 35 trillion calculations per second.

According to the International Energy Agency, hyperscale data centers consume about as much electricity annually as 400,000 electric vehicles to provide 24/7 access to online applications, services, and information.

Since 2017, Virgo has helped LIGO localize astronomical phenomena

The detector near Pisa, Italy, coordinates its experimental runs with those in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Scientists can triangulate the locations of celestial events that generate gravitational waves using signal arrival times, just as earthquake locations can be determined from measurements at three seismic stations.

Explore a map of data centers worldwide, numbering over 12,250 as of August 2026, with over 4,500 in the US.

Today's massive data centers evolved from single-room mainframes

Punch card computers from the late 1940s were used to store and process a company's data locally before the advent of desktop computers. As the amount of data and company sizes increased alongside the miniaturization of technology, mainframes were replaced by local server rooms and external facilities with interconnected servers running cloud-based and AI software.

Potential LIGO sites were selected in pairs, approximately 3,000 kilometers apart

The 1,864-mile distance meant gravitational wave signals would be detected no more than 10 milliseconds apart, ruling out many background signals. The sites needed sufficient plots of nearly flat land, proximity to infrastructure (e.g., electricity), and adequate distance from urban areas and geologically active areas to reduce environmental noise.

At the Large Hadron Collider, scientists have transformed lead into gold—a process known as chrysopoeia, which alchemists sought for centuries.

LIGO is part of the advanced gravitational wave detector network

Like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, Europe's Virgo Gravitational Wave Interferometer and Japan's Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector reflect laser beams down perpendicular tunnels to detect gravitational waves in the patterns created by the recombined waves. Future observatories are expected to contribute to this network, further improving gravitational wave detections.

With many smaller computing cores, graphics processing units process many identical tasks in parallel, whereas central processing units have fewer, larger cores built to handle a wide variety of more complex tasks sequentially.

Modular data centers can be transported on a truck for rapid deployment

Bypassing the complications involved in building larger facilities over the course of several years, such as construction costs and permits, these pre-fabricated, self-contained pods, roughly the size of shipping containers, can carry thousands of graphics processing units for small- and medium-scale AI-related tasks.

As of 2025, LUX-ZEPLIN is the world's most sensitive dark matter experiment, which is designed to indirectly detect a potential candidate for the invisible form of matter.

Global climate models simulate Earth system interactions and how human activity impacts climate

By splitting the planet into tiny 3D grid cells, supercomputers can run thousands of equations for each cell to determine the movement of energy, moisture, and other elements across Earth. The equations can also incorporate greenhouse gases to determine how humans affect the climate.

Graphic processing units rely on a hierarchy of memory for optimization, where the smallest, fastest memory—registers—is located closest to the core and provides access to data in a fraction of a nanosecond.

Some cosmic rays possess energies as high as 100,000,000 teraelectron volts—more than 10 million times the energy of particles accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider.

The first image of a black hole was created from an international telescope network

The Event Horizon Telescope united radio observatories worldwide to image the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*. The team couldn’t transmit their massive dataset online, so they physically flew hundreds of terabytes of data to MIT aboard airplanes.

The NSF funded the design and construction of LIGO by MIT and Caltech

The 1992 Cooperative Agreement between the National Science Foundation and both research institutions came twelve years after funding 1.5-meter (4.9-foot) and 40-meter (131-foot) prototypes. With a 1992 budget of $395M, LIGO was once one of the largest NSF-funded projects in history

The cloud relies on hardware infrastructure with real-world limits

While unlimited storage providers exist, this does not mean online storage is limitless, as it relies on servers, cables, power, and physical space, all of which are finite. However, the cloud seems infinite because the number of servers and data centers built outpaces demand. Storage solutions are also routinely replaced with more efficient options.

By 2028, data center power consumption may equal 22% of US households

Date from 2023 suggests that data centers accounted for around 4.4% of US electricity consumption, with new facilities supporting the AI boom consuming more power than the state of New Hampshire annually. However, the energy impact of individual use varies widely depending on the prompt and AI model. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Explore the components of the linear particle accelerator at Los Alamos

Located at the site of bomb design and development for the Manhattan Project, LANSCE features an injector system for hydrogen ions, a series of tanks with alternating electric fields for proton acceleration, and an isotope production facility that creates radioisotopes for medical treatments.

AI is estimated to drive most data center power demand growth through 2030

According to a report from the International Energy Agency, a typical AI data center in 2025 consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, but the largest under construction are expected to consume 20 times as much. Global data center electricity consumption is expected to surpass Japan's total consumption by 2030.

View a map of US data center infrastructure in 2025

Thousands of data centers across the country have already been built, with more under construction or planned. Facilities are connected via transmission and fiber optic lines, with the latter spanning an estimated length of 160 million miles.

Gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—are detected at LIGO by measuring how two lasers traveling down equally distant, perpendicular tunnels interfere with one another after they reflect back and meet.

Graphics processing units, which process large amounts of data in parallel, have become the foundational hardware for AI systems that rely on hardware capable of processing millions of text parameters simultaneously.

The Grace Hopper subsea cable transmits internet traffic across the Atlantic

Running between the US, UK, and Spain, the cable is part of an extensive underwater network of fiber optic connections that transmit data across the world at light speed. Equipped with 16 fiber pairs, the private cable was Google's first-ever subsea connection to Spain.

At CERN's Antimatter Factory, researchers create and guide antiprotons and antielectrons together to form antihydrogen, and all these antiparticles are analyzed to help scientists study the behavior of antimatter.

AI scraping for LLM training data has significantly strained Wikipedia's infrastructure

From January 2024 to April 2025, the site's bandwidth increased by 50% as automated bots downloaded terabytes of data for the large language models powering AI tools. The Wikimedia Foundation found that bots accounted for 65% of the highest demand requests (e.g., videos) despite representing just 35% of page views.

Most of the critical mineral supply needed for US data centers is imported

The country with the most data centers relies on other nations for about 80% of the rare earth elements needed for magnetic materials in storage drives, 64% of the silver and 85% of the platinum it uses for electrical circuitry, and about half the aluminum and copper used in heat sinks that dissipate thermal energy from electronic components.

Within ALICE—A Large Ion Collider Experiment—at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists have created quark-gluon plasma—an exotic form of matter present in the moments after the Big Bang.