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Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

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Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#91

Post by dylan604 »

therein wrote: post #80
dylan604 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web. I'm not exaggerating, I'm just playing what if. That's a game where you think of random things that could go wrong, and then deciding if it is worth the expense. Just because maybe you can't think of things of varying plausibility does not make…

This is the same mindset that wants to make it illegal to sell kitchen knives with sharp tips.

How do you come to that conclusion? It's so far off of what I said that you've got some splainin' to do

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#92

Post by simianwords »

saulpw wrote: post #90
simianwords wrote: post #85

I wonder if USA would have futuristic Datacenter Towns much like coal mining towns - they might have their own lore, vibe and aesthetic about them. Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help. This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.

If it actually helped the economies flourish, then that would be interesting. NIMBY is in some part a reaction to the belief (likely true) that there would be neither jobs nor tax money from a data center in their community backyard--it's all downside with no upside.

The Loudoun county has Datacenters that pay enough in taxes equalling the salary of 30k residents earning $40k dollars each (in a county of ~400k population).

This is a shockingly high upside relative to any other industry, like Car or Steel industry which pollute way more.

These taxes can be used to create better infra and have other things going on. Better schools and maybe even research facilities.

But I do think the opposition is largely ideological in nature so these arguments don't matter at the end.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#93

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #74
nixgeek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you’re right, but when the alternative is all that investment and those construction jobs AND the post-commissioning operational jobs go to a different community and a different economy, … What would you prefer? To me, local communities tend to benefit in multiple different ways during and after these projects, poorer communities become richer, communities with little opportunity now have more opportunity. I’…

But what often happens is that the company is granted a ten year tax abatement in exchange for the jobs, the jobs end up being fewer than promised, and then in ten years the company closes the site and now the community has an empty industrial brownfield that was built for one thing and can't be easily repurposed.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#94

Post by [deleted] »

marticode wrote: post #2

Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web. (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#95

Post by sethops1 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #57
dylan604 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defending Cloudflare, but what is a better solution? If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence because some group thinks it'll be funny, what protections do they have? It takes too much equipment and know-how to stop an attack for people to be able to survive online. The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket just like the mob.

The better solution to blocking entire continents is probably doing nothing. For DDoS resistance... Well I can imagine a world where a tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet gives backup access to websites that are overloaded.

> tech in the same area as IPFS or freenet

Are we getting that before or after personal jet packs, flying cars, and my tacos delivered via tacocopters?

I'll protect my sites with Cloudflare until then, thanks.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#96

Post by jeffbee »

trollbridge wrote: post #88
mindslight wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it would help their image, but this all sounds like more corporate centralization to me. I've got a functioning electric coop that provides gigabit internet for a flat fee every month. I think they're even doing trial runs of 10Gb, but I haven't looked into it because I simply don't need it. Internet access can be a solved problem these days, where there is the political will. And if anything local colleges s…

With a new data centre, your electric coop rates can go up with no benefit to you whatsoever.

In America electric rates are increasing due to 20 years of stagnation and failure to invest in transmission, and new data centers are on average associated with lower, not higher retail electric rates. This is because large consumers drive down marginal prices.

In your country things may be proceeding differently, but that's the story here.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#97

Post by bshaughn »

dylan604 wrote: post #34
marticode wrote: post #2

Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web. (also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)

I'm not defending Cloudflare, but what is a better solution? If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence because some group thinks it'll be funny, what protections do they have? It takes too much equipment and know-how to stop an attack for people to be able to survive online. The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket just like the mob.

Websites should have a lean markdown or .txt page for each human friendly webpage. A lot of the surge in bots is because of LLMs. Its insane that a technical documentation web page can use 200MB + of memory, when the core information I care about is This is something that would be perfect for cloudflare to host and sell as a service - static web pages via their CDN network.

I do not work in web development, so im sure there are plenty of details im ignorant of, but the TLDR of "how to fight accidental DDOS because of AI tooling " is make it easier for them to get the content they want.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#98

Post by tptacek »

delecti wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#99

Post by trollbridge »

culi wrote: post #61
thewebguyd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> provide multi gigabit fibre Internet to everyone nearby. Kind of a cool idea, actually. These data centers could turn the towns where they build into startup incubators. Offer free high speed internet and heavily subsidized compute to residents in exchange for building there. At least gives back economically somewhat, as a data center itself doesn't provide much in return.

Gigabit internet doesn't power startups. It powers consumer streaming. As long as you can run Zoom, you don't need high internet speeds for startups

You pretty much need low latency 1G+ to work from home these days.

Re: Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

#100

Post by 1shooner »

simianwords wrote: post #85

I wonder if USA would have futuristic Datacenter Towns much like coal mining towns - they might have their own lore, vibe and aesthetic about them. Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help. This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.

Do you see coal mining towns as a model to pursue?
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