It sounds like you're misinterpreting. The way I'm reading it, by "thousands of places" they mean "thousands of machines". Which may be an exaggeration, but i

It sounds like you're misinterpreting. The way I'm reading it, by "thousands of places" they mean "thousands of machines". Which may be an exaggeration, but it should be trivially obvious that data is sharded and must be collated for display.