From your screen to a data centre: the remarkable physical journey of an AI prompt
Your text is converted into binary, split into data packets and sent via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to your router
You type your prompt, press send, and the text disappears from your screen. What follows is invisible to you — but the physical journey your words take is nothing short of remarkable.
From keystrokes to data packets
The moment you press submit, your text is converted into binary code — zeroes and ones. Your computer breaks this into small data packets and dispatches them across your home network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to your router.
From there, the packets travel along fibre optic cables to your internet service provider's regional facility before heading to their final destination: an AI data centre that could be thousands of miles away on another continent.
Crossing oceans at the speed of light
If the destination data centre sits outside your country, the journey becomes even more extraordinary. Your data packets are converted into infrared light beams and transmitted through fibre optic cables laid on the floor of the ocean.
Light travels through glass at approximately 125,000 miles per second — fast enough to cross the entire Atlantic Ocean and reach a data centre on the opposite coast in just 40 to 80 milliseconds.
Your brain perceives delays of under 100 milliseconds as virtually instantaneous, which is why the response feels almost immediate.
Inside the data centre
Once your prompt arrives, it is routed to a specific server rack housing AI chips, GPUs, TPUs, and other specialised processors.
The server reassembles your full prompt and feeds it into the large language model. The LLM then processes your input, performing calculations across billions of parameters to begin generating a response.
Token by token, back to you
Rather than waiting for the entire response to be computed before sending it, the server streams the reply back to you in real time.
s the GPU produces output token by token, each chunk is immediately wrapped and dispatched back along the same remarkable route — arriving on your screen as fast as the physics of light and fibre will allow.