This is from John Jordan's Ten predictions for the next ten years

Although everything from power grids to bridges and ports to railways
is being built or rebuilt, my focus is on computing and networking. In
particular, power and bandwidth will be transformed in the next decade.

Power. Cloud computing vendors are waging an arms race as
they build data centers to power a range of offerings loosely called "web services."
Due to the large power consumption, these data centers are often located near cheap
hydroelectric power sources (which themselves may be affected by global climate changes).
I
One estimate, for
example, for Google's data center, housed in two adjacent buildings
in Oregon, contains 1.3 million computing cores on 9,000 racks per structure, and photographs
of the cooling towers are staggering:

Something else is also going on: Caterpillar reported that its Q2 07
revenues from sales of backup generators, such as those used in data centers, were up 41% at
a time when overall U.S. construction equipment sales are slumping. The growth of "cloud
computing" feels as though it's related to the trend toward virtualization, where
resources can be located, physically and/or logically, away from their locus of deployment. At
the end of the day, however, servers have to sit somewhere, and when they do, lots of heat follows.

At the same time, the need for portable power to support an
increasingly mobile user base means that fuel cells, batteries, and associated technologies will
also attract investment and talent. Solar power, meanwhile, is a complicated issue: there's
clearly a lot of froth around silicon panel plays, which compete with the computing sector
for resources, talent, and production capacity. How much solar helps address computing's
need for portable powerand how much it constrains it will be important to watch.

Bandwidth consumption is exploding as video expands farther and
farther into a global customer and user population. In both wired and unwired domains, a
lot is happening. On one side, perhaps even the term "wired" should be amended as optical
connectivity proves its superiority; while glass can be fabricated into cables, maybe the word
"wire" has become misleading. Delivered in the U.S. by Verizon and to a lesser extent
AT&T, fiber is driving wider delivery of 20, 50, and potentially 100 MB/sec download speeds
along with faster multiplayer gaming action and multiple high-definition television
signals. Over the ether, WiMax's future got a bit less rosy recently as Sprint dissolved its
partnership with Clearwire as the stumbling cellular carrier searches for a new CEO.
Even so, whether it's that particular technology or potentially a cellular variant, mobile
broadband will be a keyarea for the next decade.