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Why do cloud providers keep building datacenters in Phoenix?
- hinkley 3y agoThermally there are spots in western Colorado or eastern California that would be better. The problem is that if you look at maps of major internet thoroughfares in the US, there aren’t many going through Colorado. Which is probably more Kansas’ fault than Colorado.
- cashsterling 3y agoThis points to the overall conversation about how fresh water is valued. If the sliding scale for fresh water prices was more aggressive, this would change the design of cooling systems for industry and large buildings. It is straight forward to design air-cooled refrigeration systems... even for operation in very hot/desert environments. With this in mind, I think pricing water to make it more cost effective to use water cooling towers, rather than entirely air cooled systems, is very poor policy. The amount of water used to provide cooling for Las Vegas, for instance, is absolutely ridiculous.
- hnburnsy 3y agoNot mentioned is the lack of natural disaster threats. No winter storms or wild fires or earthquakes or tornadoes or hurricanes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mschuster91 3y ago> And while at $0.078 a kilowatt, Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State, which is closer to $0.04 a kilowatt, but it's still competitive, Howard said. JFC. Meanwhile, Hetzner charges 26 ct/kWh in Finland and 53 ct/kWh in Germany [1]. At these prices (and yes, I'm aware these also include the cooling costs) it's completely inexplicable to me how Germany can ever get actually competitive with US services. [1] https://www.hetzner.com/de/colocation/ https://www.hetzner.com/de/colocation/
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> it's completely inexplicable to me how Germany can ever get actually competitive with US services. Speed of light and data governance laws.
- marcosdumay 3y agoHetzner competes mainly on price. And completely clears the market on that metric. My guess is it's because the US competitors are run by incompetent people that see no need to improve anything because they have non-competitive lock-in.
- mardifoufs 3y agoOr because major American competitors do not compete on price, but rather on providing different features? Competing for low cost is not always a good idea, especially if you want to provide more services than bare bone hosting. The proof is on the scale, American corporation dominate market share internationally, and dwarf the likes of Hetzner. (not a dig against hetzner, I for sure would use them more than I'd use AWS if I was looking at building a budget conscious infra) If anything, European operators have been utterly incompetent in that regard. And not for lack of trying. The only European players left are scaleway and ovh. On the other hand, you can find tons of cheap operators in the US, they just don't get a similar rep to hetzner here on HN. Hetzner also found a very good niche with their second hand server that you can bid on, for sure. And to be clear, it provides a great service for the price.
- unethical_ban 3y agoI thought my 0.10¢ /kWh was a bit pricey. Whew. What was more shocking to me in that article was that google used 25% of Dallas's water supply. Between power use and water use, while I appreciate teaching people to be mindful and responsible, I feel like caring slightly less about where I set my thermometer or if I have a long shower when our country's resources are being depleted by big tech and alfalfa shipments to China and almond harvests in California.
- drdrey 3y ago> And while at $0.078 a kilowatt, Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State, which is closer to $0.04 a kilowatt, but it's still competitive, Howard said. what kind of writing is that? It’s unreadable, in addition to mixing kW and kWh
- gruez 3y agoYou missed the paragraphs leading up to this, which mentioned tax incentives. What they were probably trying to say was that the tax incentives were good, and the even though the electricity prices weren't the lowest in the country, the two combined makes it an unbeatable combo.
- tredre3 3y agoI think drdrey was talking about the dubious usage of commas that makes the sentence hard to ingest, not the content per se.
- namirez 3y agoAlso the proper unit is kWh rather than kW.
- Tyr42 3y agoOr it could be in Joules rather than (1000)(1J/s)*3600s
- glompers 3y agoIts writer actually used so many chained clauses that they ended up with a syntactical error... in English you can't say, "Although it isn't low enough by itself, but it is such-and-such." It's tricky in the sense that anyone could get away with saying, "Although it isn't x, still, nonetheless, it is y," which means the same thing as, "Although it isn't x, it is yet y;" and, in some contexts, 'yet' and 'but' are allowed to be treated as interchangeable synonyms. They probably just didn't have enough time or energy to finish the thought with enough attention, and punctuation has such usage conventions in order to let it aid rather than to confuse comprehension and attention. Commas are deceptively easy to get into without overhead, but not to get out of without it. We could simply abuse the commas and still choose either one of the following thoughts, but the Register ended up splitting the difference: At $0.078 a kilowatt, Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State['s], which is closer to $0.04 a kilowatt, but it's still competitive, Howard said. And, Howard said, while Phoenix's power, at $0.078 a kilowatt, isn't as cheap as Washington State['s], which is closer to $0.04 a kilowatt, it's still competitive.
- dubcanada 3y agoI guess the answer is regions. If they built all their DCs in Washington there wouldn't be any DCs in south middle area of US. And since temperatures are largely based on proximity to the equator, it would mean zero DCs near the equator. But I really don't know what the article is implying. We should built zero DCs anywhere hot? Or DCs use lots of resources, like water and power which are in short supply in deserts?
- konschubert 3y agoDeserts are great for power since you have space and sun for Solar
- jononomo 3y agoIf you go near the equator but go up in altitude then it won't be hot. There are places in Costa Rica and Columbia where it is basically 72-degrees every day all year.
- cannonpalms 3y agoI wonder what impact cosmic radiation has at those altitudes. I seem to recall experiments somewhere in Colorado that demonstrated a need for ECC, etc.
- dubcanada 3y agoTrue, but wouldn't water be harder to get? From my understanding tops of mountains would have significantly less water reserves than valleys. Although they may have more then deserts...
- jononomo 3y agoWell, Costa Rica has a long rainy season with torrential downpours. In fact, they have so much hydropower that they are a net energy exporter. Here is a paragraph I found at https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/costa-rica https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/costa-rica: > Costa Rica has a notable geographic advantage in that its concentration per capita of rivers, dams and volcanoes allow for high levels of renewable energy production. This abundance of natural resources and favourable rainfall levels are beneficial for great amounts of hydropower generation. Long story short: lot's of rainfall and lots of mountains means lots of water flowing downhill.
- ghaff 3y agoThat area of the country is also pretty seismically stable and generally doesn't have other sorts of natural disasters. (Some wildfires but not everywhere.)
- fhsm 3y agoAnd has a lot of sunny days - whether falling in your crop or your panels.
- mgw 3y agoThe Register misquotes itself by writing that “Google's datacenters in Dallas, Texas consumed more than a quarter of the city's water supply”. Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_dalles/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_da...
- snowwrestler 3y agoAnd The Dalles, unlike Dallas, has a huge source of water available: the mighty Columbia River, currently flowing 140,000 to 240,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). (Snowmelt causes daily surges.) The Trinity River at Dallas, TX is currently running at 400 cfs, LOL.
- shawndrost 3y agoThis makes the datacenter out to be a massive water user. Which it is, in some sense. It's also worth considering that this volume of water usage -- 274.5 million gallons per annum, or 842 acre-feet -- is about 1/3 that of an average-size (445 acre) farm.
- irrational 3y agoYou mean The Dalles that sits on the banks of the humongous Columbia River? That’s the one they are worried about using too much water? The Columbia River pours more water into the Pacific Ocean than any other river in the Western Hemisphere. Are they worried about the Pacific Ocean going dry?
- michaelcampbell 3y agoI get that it's common usage (and that's what language basically is), but when I see "80 times smaller" my brain screams "80 times what? Wouldn't `1 times smaller` be zero?" Yes, brain, yes it would.
- briffle 3y agoGoogle in The Dalles, OR site also uses much less water than the Aluminum smelter that used to be at their current location.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bob1029 3y agoIs it not possible to run a datacenter completely dry by making certain compromises?
- ghaff 3y agoI'm going to say only by consuming vastly more electricity to dissipate the heat using closed loop systems. (And probably not completely in any case.)
- gottorf 3y agoThey're talking about some special evaporative cooling system. Thousands of datacenters around the country run on garden-variety HVAC systems that don't require any water, just regular refrigerant.
- re-thc 3y agoData centers live off connectivity. You can't just build it anywhere. It's not just about the cloud provider. What about other cloud providers, ISPs, exchanges, peering endpoints, etc? There needs to be good fiber routes to other cities or data centers in the region. You can't just pick a random city and hope AT&T, Verizon, NTT or whoever would turn up. You can surely pay for it but then that might cost more than the power and other concerns. If there's not enough bandwidth you wouldn't even survive a DDoS attack.
- britzkopf 3y agoBut I often think surely there must be some viable economic model in which a data center is built in some remote area with plentiful hydroelectric or geothermal power that would largely go unharnessed, and that cheap source of power makes building specific connectivity infrastructure to that location feasible, no? Someone correct me...
- latchkey 3y agoNote the number of datacenters in Quincy, WA and the Coinmint facility in Massena, NY.
- immibis 3y agoThere is, it's called Bitcoin mining.
- latchkey 3y agoYou're kind of right, except for the connectivity portion. Bitcoin mining requires very little bandwidth. People are successfully large scale mining on starlink connections.
- coding123 3y agoEvery time these kind of stories come up, I just think of that guy in Chandler, AZ that just hears wump wump wump wump of the air conditioner all year round. I feel for him. Hopefully he moved.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- s3p 3y agoUnfamiliar with this.. what happened?
- coding123 3y agoWell, I tried to find the specific story but I can't. However since that article first came out, apparently it highlighted the issue and now articles like this seem to be coming up: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/chandler/2021/11/22/chandler-wants-ban-more-data-centers-after-years-complaints/8627569002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/chandler/2021/11/... It's one of those things that once you hear it, you can't un-hear it.
- yellow_lead 3y agoThe answer: > Of course, all the property, tax incentives, and power you ever want won't do cloud providers much good if it's in the middle of nowhere. Latency is still a factor and cloud providers like to spread their datacenters out to serve broad geographic regions. In the case of the Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population. I'm kind of put off by the title - which sounds as if they should not build in hot areas. It should be "Here's why cloud providers keep building datacenters in the America's hottest city"
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI’m curious why they use water instead of solar and AC with good insulation. Cheaper?
- bobthepanda 3y agoSufficiently big AC systems often use water cooling because water is more effective at transferring heat than air, is cheaper than other liquids, and unlike other liquids is not a massive safety hazard if it leaks. It is why if you want to defrost something quickly, leave it in water rather than in the open air.
- xwowsersx 3y agoBasically, yes. It's about cooling efficiency, cost-effectiveness, practicality and scalability. Water has excellent heat transfer properties, which allows for efficient cooling. As I understand it, solar will have limited capacity and depend on sunlight availability..which obviously fluctuates based on weather conditions, whereas data centers need continuous power supply. Also, cost of installing a large-scale solar power system and maintaining battery storage can be high.
- Two4 3y agoUsing solar without batteries to supplement baseload requirements is a great cost-cutting exercise, because it reduces grid draw when data center power requirements are highest (business hours) and electricity is most expensive. You can also add batteries later if they start to make more business sense.
- s3p 3y agoThis article made me dizzy. It keeps going back and forth and destroying every point it tries to make. >A state bill signed into law in early 2021, extended tax breaks on the use, installation, assembly, repair or maintenance of datacenter equipment, for most Arizona datacenter >However, cheap land and favorable tax incentives aren't the only thing cloud providers are looking for. >Access to power is another important factor. >Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State >Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population. >However, proximity won't do much good if you don't have adequate connectivity to support them.
- polio 3y agoWould it make sense to build a datacentre underground to help with cooling?
- callalex 3y agoHeat that builds up underground doesn’t really ever leave and eventually causes big problems. Here is a recent example in Chicago: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/climate/chicago-underground-heat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/climate/chicago-undergrou...
- sparker72678 3y agoIt is typically much more expensive to dig down than build on the surface, and in the Phoenix area ground temps are still very warm. A well insulated building on the surface will be easier to build, maintain, and won’t require significantly more energy to keep cool. (And with a data center, the majority of the heat is coming from inside the facility, not the environment outside.)
- on2k17nm 3y agoJust like how global tech companies rent out facilities build on lakebeds in Bangalore, India :-)