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.

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 6.8 times.

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 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)

Weighing about as much as the Eiffel Tower, ATLAS integrates concentric layers of sensors to analyze the properties of particles produced in collisions of accelerated ions. More than 3 petabytes of data—equivalent to 600 years of music—are collected from this experiment each year.

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

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 1955 to help bring protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light—about 3.28 million football fields per second.

Most data centers rely on the local power grid to feed power-hungry computer equipment

These facilities house rows of vertical racks containing multiple types of hardware, including servers that provide 24/7 access to online applications, services, and data. In a hyperscale center with thousands of these racks, the annual electricity used is estimated to equal that of 400,000 electric vehicles.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Experiments at the LEP, which first ran in 1989, studied the electroweak interaction, which governs radioactive decay.

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.

The novel heat exchanger extracts thermal energy from water heated after it circulated through equipment and transfers it to the town of Ferney-Voltaire's heating network. The system is expected to prevent the release of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide and reduce the atmospheric heating caused by the accelerator's water passing through a cooling tower.

Despite fears of creating black holes, the Large Hadron Collider produces collisions with energies of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, about 10 million times smaller than the energy needed to create the lightest possible black holes.

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.

Explore a map of data centers worldwide

As of February 2026, the US has more data centers (over 4,000) than the next 15 countries combined, thanks to years of investment by cloud service providers and technology companies. The next largest data center footprints come from the UK and Germany, with about 500 facilities each, followed by China with about 370.

A facility at CERN is dedicated to creating and analyzing anti-hydrogen

Dubbed the "antimatter factory," the site was built to study the properties of dark matter and identify any inconsistencies with existing particle physics models. Antimatter particles have the same mass as normal matter, but opposite charge and other quantum properties.