“It was promoted as giving your office an automatic memory,” said Craig Robertson, an expert on filing cabinets. “People were surprisingly excited by it.”

The arctic nation wants to become a global capital of hard drives and servers.

And the business of data centers for cloud computing is only growing.

Every purchase, online web search and even cellphone call generates data that companies hope to use to boost sales. But storing all that data is becoming a big expense, and it has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry.