3 ms·

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

by rolph 3mo ago

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?

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

by rolph 3mo ago

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

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?