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My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance. How big "should

by delecti 5mo ago

My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance. How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.

jeffbee 5mo ago
Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.
- dqv 5mo ago
  Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that. You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces. Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation. Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area. If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same. The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.
  - jeffbee 5mo ago
    I think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had. https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Center/@43.5123707,-88.8039434,2516m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Cent...
    - dqv 5mo ago
      That's not how stormwater management works. Land elevation, adjacent land, the profile of the land (how much groundwater is there?) on which the structure is built (and probably even more that I'm not considering) all affect how big of a retention/detention pond is needed. And these requirements change over time when it is discovered that older sites' management techniques failed to adequately manage stormwater. The Walmart site was built at least two decades ago, no? That's enough time for stormwater management guidance and policy to change. Even then, it is improper to assume anything about the stormwater management needs of one site based on another unrelated site. But even then, Walmart's site seems to be completely surrounded by stormwater management. Even the northwest corner of the site is a detention basin. [0] The most obvious and logical conclusion to be made here is that an engineer told Microsoft they needed to have stormwater management of that size, so that's what they put in their plans. No sweetness, just lawsuit prevention. If they want to be sweet, they should be building huge nature preserves (and they have enough money to afford it) into these plans instead of trying to be greedy by building the largest possible structures (they think) they can get away with. [0]: https://beacon.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=DodgeCountyWI&PageTypeID=1&searchparcelid=20612141421001 https://beacon.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=DodgeC...
jubilanti 5mo ago
I assume you mean AWS us-east-1. It isn't a single data center. It is a cluster of data centers around Northern Virginia.
manarth 5mo ago
That's the land allocation rather than the building-size / data-centre size. The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres). As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security… 244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.
- nixgeek 5mo ago
  Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/utah-stratos-project-data-center-kevin-oleary https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u... Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up. A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space. Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.
  - manarth 5mo ago
    40,000 acres, aka 77 × Monaco's! TIL.
    - dnnddidiej 5mo ago
      10 micro-Russias 400 vaticans
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    > Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end So far it seems to be more of a concept of a plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they build smaller scale data centers first, then cancel the 40000 acres expansion. That sorts of feel like a marketing tactic. If not and they are serious, are we close to peak bubble?
badlibrarian 5mo ago
[dead]
LeFantome 5mo ago
us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each. So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres. Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.
- nixgeek 5mo ago
  AWS publicly stated I think in 2021 that the larger availability zones in US East 1 consisted of 17-18 datacenters each. It’s likely grown a lot since, and they recently announced AZ7 will be online in Maryland soon, so they must be running out of ability to grow the ones in NoVA. I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something… All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption. James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed — https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton20221010.pdf https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton2022101...
  - LeFantome 5mo ago
    If so, us-east-1 may be over 1000 acres of floor space. For comparison, Disney World is 600 acres and Central Park is about 850.
mapt 5mo ago
Based on a majority of games regions, US-East-1 is scattered properties in a <100 square mile area near Dulles Airport in Virginia, associated with an Internet backbone junction and former AOL campus in small town called Ashburn.
tptacek 5mo ago
Caledonia is an exurb of Milwaukee, so it's pretty sparse and spread out. There isn't that much demand for land on the outskirts of Milwaukee and most of the demand out there is industrial. Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.
- CPLX 5mo ago
  > Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable. Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular. Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.
  - gottorf 5mo ago
    > The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality. Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one. > data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
    - tptacek 5mo ago
      The bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center". Like: if you have the option of getting the Boeing plant, get the Boeing plant! Racine County does not have that option. Meanwhile, the happy sounding businesses there --- like the duck farm --- are actually major polluters, and more problematic for the region than a data center. The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.

by delecti 5mo ago

jeffbee 5mo ago

Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.

dqv 5mo ago
Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that. You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces. Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation. Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area. If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same. The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.
- jeffbee 5mo ago
  I think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had. https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Center/@43.5123707,-88.8039434,2516m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Cent...
  - dqv 5mo ago
    That's not how stormwater management works. Land elevation, adjacent land, the profile of the land (how much groundwater is there?) on which the structure is built (and probably even more that I'm not considering) all affect how big of a retention/detention pond is needed. And these requirements change over time when it is discovered that older sites' management techniques failed to adequately manage stormwater. The Walmart site was built at least two decades ago, no? That's enough time for stormwater management guidance and policy to change. Even then, it is improper to assume anything about the stormwater management needs of one site based on another unrelated site. But even then, Walmart's site seems to be completely surrounded by stormwater management. Even the northwest corner of the site is a detention basin. [0] The most obvious and logical conclusion to be made here is that an engineer told Microsoft they needed to have stormwater management of that size, so that's what they put in their plans. No sweetness, just lawsuit prevention. If they want to be sweet, they should be building huge nature preserves (and they have enough money to afford it) into these plans instead of trying to be greedy by building the largest possible structures (they think) they can get away with. [0]: https://beacon.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=DodgeCountyWI&PageTypeID=1&searchparcelid=20612141421001 https://beacon.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=DodgeC...

jubilanti 5mo ago

I assume you mean AWS us-east-1. It isn't a single data center. It is a cluster of data centers around Northern Virginia.

manarth 5mo ago

That's the land allocation rather than the building-size / data-centre size. The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres). As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security… 244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.

nixgeek 5mo ago
Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/utah-stratos-project-data-center-kevin-oleary https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u... Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up. A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space. Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.
- manarth 5mo ago
  40,000 acres, aka 77 × Monaco's! TIL.
  - dnnddidiej 5mo ago
    10 micro-Russias 400 vaticans
- dgellow 5mo ago
  > Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end So far it seems to be more of a concept of a plan. I wouldn’t be surprised if they build smaller scale data centers first, then cancel the 40000 acres expansion. That sorts of feel like a marketing tactic. If not and they are serious, are we close to peak bubble?

badlibrarian 5mo ago

[dead]

LeFantome 5mo ago

us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each. So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres. Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.

nixgeek 5mo ago
AWS publicly stated I think in 2021 that the larger availability zones in US East 1 consisted of 17-18 datacenters each. It’s likely grown a lot since, and they recently announced AZ7 will be online in Maryland soon, so they must be running out of ability to grow the ones in NoVA. I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something… All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption. James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed — https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton20221010.pdf https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton2022101...
- LeFantome 5mo ago
  If so, us-east-1 may be over 1000 acres of floor space. For comparison, Disney World is 600 acres and Central Park is about 850.

mapt 5mo ago

Based on a majority of games regions, US-East-1 is scattered properties in a <100 square mile area near Dulles Airport in Virginia, associated with an Internet backbone junction and former AOL campus in small town called Ashburn.

tptacek 5mo ago

Caledonia is an exurb of Milwaukee, so it's pretty sparse and spread out. There isn't that much demand for land on the outskirts of Milwaukee and most of the demand out there is industrial. Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.

CPLX 5mo ago
> Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable. Why? The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision. That is precisely why data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular. Compare and contrast to something like a Boeing assembly plant with thousands of high-paid skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors.
- gottorf 5mo ago
  > The ratio of jobs and taxes to local resources tied up has to be one of the worst possible trade-offs of any industrial use that you can envision Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality. Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one. > data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.
  - tptacek 5mo ago
    The bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center". Like: if you have the option of getting the Boeing plant, get the Boeing plant! Racine County does not have that option. Meanwhile, the happy sounding businesses there --- like the duck farm --- are actually major polluters, and more problematic for the region than a data center. The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.