Where are your photos really stored? A look inside data centers
By the Archibou Team
When we say "my photos are in the cloud," we often picture a blue sky somewhere above our heads. The reality is more down-to-earth: the cloud is servers — hard drives, in buildings, somewhere in the world.
And that "somewhere" matters.
The cloud isn't in the clouds
A data center is a large building full of hard drives connected to the Internet. When you use Google Photos, your photos are sent to Google's servers, copied across multiple drives to prevent loss, and accessible from any device.
It's convenient. But the question we forget to ask is: where are these servers?
Google owns data centers around the world. Some in Europe (Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Ireland), others in the United States, Asia, and South America. Depending on location, your photos may be stored across several of these data centers simultaneously for redundancy.
The jurisdiction question
This is where it gets interesting. Google is an American company. Its headquarters is in the United States. And that means it's subject to US law.
In 2018, the United States passed the CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act). This law allows the US government to request data stored by any American company — regardless of where the servers are located.
In practice, even if your photos are stored on a server in Belgium, they remain accessible through American legal proceedings, because Google is a US company.
It's a question of jurisdiction, not geography.
That's why the debate about digital sovereignty isn't limited to "where are the servers." It's also "who owns the company?" and "which law applies?"
Three questions to ask
For any storage service, three questions are enough to understand what happens to your data:
- Where is my data hosted? (country, data center)
- Who can access it? (the company, authorities, third parties?)
- Can I leave easily? (export, portability, open formats?)
If you can answer these three questions, you know what you're doing with your digital memories.
What Archibou chooses
Archibou made a simple choice:
- Hosting: with Clever Cloud, data center in Paris (Paris IXe).
- Jurisdiction: French company, French law. No American subsidiary.
- Transparency: we hide nothing about our infrastructure.
This isn't a judgment on Google. It's a different choice, for those who want to know where their photos are and who can access them.
Because storage isn't a question of clouds. It's a question of trust.
Want to learn more? Archibou opens on October 1, 2026. Sign up to be notified.