3 ms·
Cheap land is nice, but it's not the only concern. Data centres make a lot more money per square foot than things like farming, after all. You also want cheap,
by michaelt 9mo ago
Cheap land is nice, but it's not the only concern. Data centres make a lot more money per square foot than things like farming, after all.
You also want cheap, reliable power. Ideally eco-friendly. And you want backbone connectivity, of course. Local suppliers who know the construction and maintenance needs of a data centre. No earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, or tornadoes. A local government that won't tax you too much, and that won't get upset when you employ very few people.
- ben_w 9mo agoI know why I, personally, consider eco-friendly power to be ideal; but why would the builder of a DC care?
- michaelt 9mo agoSo they can put it on a page like [1] and [2] Most large companies impose certain costs on society, and have to manage their reputation. Often it's cheaper to improve public opinion in a peripheral area than to address deep-seated problems. Putting a data centre close to a hydroelectric dam helps offset your product's impact on users' mental health, your disregard for competition law, etc. [1] https://datacenters.google/operating-sustainably/ https://datacenters.google/operating-sustainably/ [2] https://sustainability.atmeta.com/data-centers/ https://sustainability.atmeta.com/data-centers/
- ben_w 9mo agoI don't buy that reasoning, even with that desire to manage their reputation: Those lists are the companies marking their own homework and congratulating themselves as PR, AKA "greenwashing". They can do that just fine by spinning a single metric of their choice where they do less-badly than their pick of mean, median, and mode of whoever else they want to compare themselves against, they don't actually need to be genuinely eco-friendly at anything.