Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tmj4.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 201 posts

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

#141

Post by Gander5739 »

lstodd wrote: post #113
warkdarrior wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As a small website owner, I can use Cloudflare or I can wait for this imagined tech.

You can use CF and lose relevance. Or even go beyond that and outright geoip-block . Ofc it's your choice. For some reason there are many small sites I have no problem visiting and then there are those CF users which may or may not work at any given moment, forcing me to ignore them. Well, good luck. You are cutting yourself from the internet, not cutting me off.

You can use CF and lose, say, 10% of your audience (number pulled from thin air). Or you can not use CF, be taken down by scraping bots or a dos attack or whatever and lose 100% of your audience.

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

#142

Post by tptacek »

gottorf wrote: post #139
CPLX wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 skill…

> 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…

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.

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

#143

Post by Dig1t »

arjie wrote: post #4

What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset. This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.

Yes it's called zoning, it's why we have a housing shortage in the USA. It makes building new things nearly impossible. It's also why none of the homes in Los Angeles that burnt down in massive fires a few years ago are being rebuilt, and likely won't be rebuilt for decades (if at all).

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

#144

Post by jeffbee »

mindslight wrote: post #135
jeffbee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn't really hold when we're talking about discrete pieces of infrastructure that may need to be built. If the current transmission infrastructure is fine for the current users, and then a new large user comes along that necessitates new infrastructure, that is a huge new cost that simply that simply didn't exist without that large user. I believe in many areas this is the kind of infrastructure investment tha…

Your model of the infrastructure as a perpetually sustaining asset is not correct. These assets must be continually refreshed and improved or their value disappears. The emergence of the data center as a point load has merely coincided with the existing grid infrastructure falling to pieces. The places with the highest marginal energy prices such as California are the places with the fewest data centers. Large consumers invest in transmission assets that benefit everybody.

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

#145

Post by dogcomplex »

manarth wrote: post #11
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.

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.

It also buffers for all the surrounding properties which would otherwise complain about noise.

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

#146

Post by culi »

weakfish wrote: post #122
trollbridge wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

... do you? I have 500mpbs and both my partner and I WFH with no problems.

For group calls you just need 1.0 Mbps. If you want 1080p group calls you need 3.8 Mbps. Zoom itself says for a "reliable WFH setup" you should have "at least 25 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload"

I've gotten by on McDonald's wifi

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

#147

Post by dv_dt »

edmundsauto wrote: post #72
nixgeek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unusual to buy the land and take a gamble on its utility, at least whenever datacenter construction is involved. Purchasing parties are risk averse to this exact scenario and work hard to craft contracts that reduce risk. Often the choices are — 1. Buy land at $/acre that reflects very little premium, based on a short feasibility study, but without any ultimate contingency that permitting will occur. This is you…

The second option also incentivizes the seller, who is often a local real estate magnate, to pressure local officials to issue the permits.

both options incentivizes the buyer to also lobby local officials

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

#148

Post by dylan604 »

bshaughn wrote: post #97
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.

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 sur…

Problem is there's no way to ensure that the bots will only suck in the bot friendly file instead of scraping the whole site. The bot owner would never be able to guarantee that the site doesn't have data not in the bot friendly file. Any time you have to maintain two sets of files is pretty much guaranteed that one will be out of sync at some point. Not all sites are driven by a database that generates files on the fly.

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

#149

Post by thereisnospork »

arjie wrote: post #4

What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset. This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.

Pretty much. The discretionary nature of permitting, and other add-ons like CEQA, pose an enormous, and worse, unpredictable, burden on attempting to start a business in many places.

It'd be one thing if the requirements were merely onerous, but the discretionary nature adds corruption greatly favoring incumbents, the deep pocketed, and those willing to disregard the rules (start-ups with low capital requirements).

Never mind the timeline of these processes. Permitting can take 18-24 months, as can items like basic utility upgrades (adding 480V service, for instance, to an existing building can be an 18 month ~quarter million dollar endeavor.)

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

#150

Post by ninalanyon »

manarth wrote: post #11
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.

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.

How much parking does a data centre need, and why is it not placed underneath the building, underground? Why do cars have to take up so much land?
Post reply on HN