is now in the cloud. we store our photos, ourfamily memories, our shopping lists, and our endless, endless emails to this other place. but the cloud is not some bunch of mist floating in the sky. no, it s a vast digital infrastructure, huge networks of cables and processes, the cogs behind the our online world and housing. all of this are data centres, increasingly and housing all of this are data centres, increasingly massive buildings containing vast banks of servers, holding and crunching our ever expanding online existence. and it s a business on the rise a global market estimated to have been worth under $200 billion back in 2020 is predicted to reach over half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade, which would mean growing something in the region of over 10% a year, all driven by our expanding use of the web. in fact, well overfive billion people were estimated to have used the internet last year. that s around two thirds of the world s population. and as you c
at which we are acquiring it. and just to clarify it, in the last year, we have made zero really zero profits in b2c retail in the uk and that despite the fact that the working capital requirements have increased dramatically. leo, do you think governments are doing enough? should they be doing more in an intervening to assist those that i guess are the hardest hit? we had the same discussions all across europe, i guess the first. ..absolute must is a given that we have seen the prices exploding from something like e30 per megawatt hour on the power side, to 300, 400, 500. although by a factor, an order of magnitude that was just too much and too fast.