8 ms·

Back in 2019, I was amazed to learn just how many buildings in Seattle's downtown were Amazon offices. IIRC, it was dozens of buildings, some entirely owned by

by wxw 3mo ago

Back in 2019, I was amazed to learn just how many buildings in Seattle's downtown were Amazon offices. IIRC, it was dozens of buildings, some entirely owned by Amazon, some WeWork leases, etc. Downtown isn't very big, so that's a huge presence. It was also fun to check out the company-city that is Redmond, not far away. Seattle's a great city, and it's got great tech presence. I'm optimistic for its recovery.

rolph 3mo ago
owned by amazon .. now where should data centers be constructed, rather than arable farmland?
- bartread 3mo ago
  It’s an interesting thought. One wonders if a lot of the utility infrastructure they need would be more readily available and/or be less negatively impactful to build as well.
  - rolph 3mo ago
    at face it seems like it would be "retooling" rather than ground up construction, with foundations for connection infra, it should go up fast, and easy if AMZ already owns it.
  - danudey 3mo ago
    Just for reference, Peer 1 has a data centre in downtown Vancouver which, fifteen or so years ago, was able to accept my then-employer as a client and offer us a quarter, half, or full rack, but could only offer us enough actual power to run about two servers. The reason being that they had a huge number of old, grandfathered-in clients with old systems from ten or fifteen years ago which were using massive amounts of power for the work they were doing; newer systems could do the same work for a tenth the power or less, but the customers have no reason to upgrade so they don't. Getting any more power into the building, I was told, would require having BC Hydro replace the transmission lines coming into the building, which would expand out to a modernization of a lot of the transmission lines in the neighbourhood. For obvious reasons it was cheaper for them to just build a new data centre somewhere else, though they wouldn't say where at the time. When it comes to the hyperscale data centres that are all the rage these days, it's very likely that downtown Seattle doesn't have the power infrastructure to support very many, if any; couple that with the claim from this random website I've never heard of that hyperscale data centres could be up to 10 million square feet and you'd probably have to bulldoze half of downtown Seattle to build the infrastructure required. https://programs.com/resources/data-center-statistics/ https://programs.com/resources/data-center-statistics/
    - bartread 3mo ago
      Your 3rd paragraph: I wondered if something like that might be the issue, hence my somewhat tentative musing. Legacy of all kinds seems always to be so expensive to deal with.
    - hirsin 3mo ago
      Fwiw there's a 290k sqft DC on Denny a few blocks from the Amazon towers https://h5datacenters.com/seattle-colocation.html https://h5datacenters.com/seattle-colocation.html If you live in Seattle you've probably walked right past it. Small potatoes compared to a 10M sqft DC but it hosts real traffic.
- dlcarrier 3mo ago
  How about arid land? We have a lot of that in the Pacific Southwest.
  - consensus1 3mo ago
    Build where there is water people complain. Build where there is no water people complain.
    - dlcarrier 3mo ago
      There's a surprising amount of farming in arid regions Maybe we should replace those farms with data centers, to reduce water consumption.
- m3047 3mo ago
  As someone pointed out in a conversation elsewhere, datacenter water use is a small part of total water use (in WA and CA), which is dominated by agriculture. Simple, obvious answer to your rhetorical question is: where there's water and power. But city water and city power are not the same as what ag needs / wants / suffers. City water and city power have reliability and purity / quality standards which ag doesn't need (not enough to pay for it). Do the objectives / needs of datacenters comport with the constraints and drivers which evolved city water / power? How do the constituents who paid for (and probably are still paying for) the buildout feel about the resource _which they own_ being utilized for a purpose which maybe doesn't comport with the _contract_ they thought they were getting?
sublinear 3mo ago
Wasn't the shared-workspace business model to take advantage of these vacancies? Despite the graph shown in the article, I have to wonder if this is really a new problem.
pllbnk 3mo ago
What's the point of the "recovery" in terms of stuffing people back to the offices when they can successfully perform their work from home?
asveikau 3mo ago
The neighborhoods they built that stuff in (mostly South Lake Union and Denny Triangle) used to be so sleepy in 2010 and earlier. It was a big transformation.
- hedgehog 3mo ago
  They were (maybe still are?) around 20% of sq feet overall and a lot of that was leases in buildings far from SLU with no obvious Amazon branding.
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  Earlier than that, they were actively dangerous. I spent a lot of my childhood in Belltown, and it was not a safe place in the late 80s and early 90s. SLU and Denny Triangle are amazing now. Those are some of the few places with restaurants open into the evenings. Amazon, like them or not, does a great job prioritizing local businesses in the retail spaces in their buildings. They can't all survive, but they've had a good track record.
  - asveikau 3mo ago
    I haven't lived in Seattle since 2011. I remember Belltown having one or two blocks that felt a little spotty or like you wanted your guard up, but the rest of it was thoroughly gentrified by the time I left, and it was a common choice to live for new college grads from the suburbs arriving to work in tech. I have to assume the process has continued.
    - Schiendelman 3mo ago
      Yep, it's even fancier now. The main spot where it seems sketchy is directly across the street from the Downtown Emergency Service Center.
    - shawn_w 3mo ago
      The area around 3rd and Blanchard is sketchy, but in the rest of Belltown the biggest hazards are incompetent Uber/lyft/doordash/etc. drivers and drunk people on lyme scooters.
dlcarrier 3mo ago
While visiting a family member at least a decade ago, I went to a fireworks display in Redmond, and two things really stood out. First: It doesn't get dark until practically midnight, so the fireworks show started at 10:00, but it was still pretty light. The second: Most families there had at least one parent with a Windows phone or Surface Tablet, back when they only used ARM processors. I had seen maybe one of each in use before that, and suddenly I was surrounded by them.

by wxw 3mo ago

rolph 3mo ago

owned by amazon .. now where should data centers be constructed, rather than arable farmland?

bartread 3mo ago
It’s an interesting thought. One wonders if a lot of the utility infrastructure they need would be more readily available and/or be less negatively impactful to build as well.
- rolph 3mo ago
  at face it seems like it would be "retooling" rather than ground up construction, with foundations for connection infra, it should go up fast, and easy if AMZ already owns it.
- danudey 3mo ago
  Just for reference, Peer 1 has a data centre in downtown Vancouver which, fifteen or so years ago, was able to accept my then-employer as a client and offer us a quarter, half, or full rack, but could only offer us enough actual power to run about two servers. The reason being that they had a huge number of old, grandfathered-in clients with old systems from ten or fifteen years ago which were using massive amounts of power for the work they were doing; newer systems could do the same work for a tenth the power or less, but the customers have no reason to upgrade so they don't. Getting any more power into the building, I was told, would require having BC Hydro replace the transmission lines coming into the building, which would expand out to a modernization of a lot of the transmission lines in the neighbourhood. For obvious reasons it was cheaper for them to just build a new data centre somewhere else, though they wouldn't say where at the time. When it comes to the hyperscale data centres that are all the rage these days, it's very likely that downtown Seattle doesn't have the power infrastructure to support very many, if any; couple that with the claim from this random website I've never heard of that hyperscale data centres could be up to 10 million square feet and you'd probably have to bulldoze half of downtown Seattle to build the infrastructure required. https://programs.com/resources/data-center-statistics/ https://programs.com/resources/data-center-statistics/
  - bartread 3mo ago
    Your 3rd paragraph: I wondered if something like that might be the issue, hence my somewhat tentative musing. Legacy of all kinds seems always to be so expensive to deal with.
  - hirsin 3mo ago
    Fwiw there's a 290k sqft DC on Denny a few blocks from the Amazon towers https://h5datacenters.com/seattle-colocation.html https://h5datacenters.com/seattle-colocation.html If you live in Seattle you've probably walked right past it. Small potatoes compared to a 10M sqft DC but it hosts real traffic.
dlcarrier 3mo ago
How about arid land? We have a lot of that in the Pacific Southwest.
- consensus1 3mo ago
  Build where there is water people complain. Build where there is no water people complain.
  - dlcarrier 3mo ago
    There's a surprising amount of farming in arid regions Maybe we should replace those farms with data centers, to reduce water consumption.
m3047 3mo ago
As someone pointed out in a conversation elsewhere, datacenter water use is a small part of total water use (in WA and CA), which is dominated by agriculture. Simple, obvious answer to your rhetorical question is: where there's water and power. But city water and city power are not the same as what ag needs / wants / suffers. City water and city power have reliability and purity / quality standards which ag doesn't need (not enough to pay for it). Do the objectives / needs of datacenters comport with the constraints and drivers which evolved city water / power? How do the constituents who paid for (and probably are still paying for) the buildout feel about the resource _which they own_ being utilized for a purpose which maybe doesn't comport with the _contract_ they thought they were getting?

sublinear 3mo ago

Wasn't the shared-workspace business model to take advantage of these vacancies? Despite the graph shown in the article, I have to wonder if this is really a new problem.

pllbnk 3mo ago

What's the point of the "recovery" in terms of stuffing people back to the offices when they can successfully perform their work from home?

asveikau 3mo ago

The neighborhoods they built that stuff in (mostly South Lake Union and Denny Triangle) used to be so sleepy in 2010 and earlier. It was a big transformation.

hedgehog 3mo ago
They were (maybe still are?) around 20% of sq feet overall and a lot of that was leases in buildings far from SLU with no obvious Amazon branding.
Schiendelman 3mo ago
Earlier than that, they were actively dangerous. I spent a lot of my childhood in Belltown, and it was not a safe place in the late 80s and early 90s. SLU and Denny Triangle are amazing now. Those are some of the few places with restaurants open into the evenings. Amazon, like them or not, does a great job prioritizing local businesses in the retail spaces in their buildings. They can't all survive, but they've had a good track record.
- asveikau 3mo ago
  I haven't lived in Seattle since 2011. I remember Belltown having one or two blocks that felt a little spotty or like you wanted your guard up, but the rest of it was thoroughly gentrified by the time I left, and it was a common choice to live for new college grads from the suburbs arriving to work in tech. I have to assume the process has continued.
  - Schiendelman 3mo ago
    Yep, it's even fancier now. The main spot where it seems sketchy is directly across the street from the Downtown Emergency Service Center.
  - shawn_w 3mo ago
    The area around 3rd and Blanchard is sketchy, but in the rest of Belltown the biggest hazards are incompetent Uber/lyft/doordash/etc. drivers and drunk people on lyme scooters.

dlcarrier 3mo ago

While visiting a family member at least a decade ago, I went to a fireworks display in Redmond, and two things really stood out. First: It doesn't get dark until practically midnight, so the fireworks show started at 10:00, but it was still pretty light. The second: Most families there had at least one parent with a Windows phone or Surface Tablet, back when they only used ARM processors. I had seen maybe one of each in use before that, and suddenly I was surrounded by them.