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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)

#101

Post by simianwords »

1shooner wrote: post #100
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?

Yes they contributed enormous growth without which USA could not have been a dominant power. There are better alternatives now however.

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

#102

Post by sandeepkd »

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.

Makes me wonder if the company protecting against the DDOS would have motivation to encourage or facilitate the DDOS efforts too, makes them the protection racket itself.

If DDOS is really the problem we want to solve then it would be awesome if one can do it without looking into the packet. SSL terminating at some centralized third party provider is way too much power.

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

#103

Post by llm_nerd »

isodev wrote: post #66
llm_nerd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case a site is geoblocking. It's an affiliate station is Wisconsin, serving up local news. Sites have been using things like MaxMind and blanket blocking entire regions long before Cloudflare. If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your l…

This is such a narrow PoV and I don't see how it relates to Cloudflare currently being de factor gatekeeper for every web properly of consequence. What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible? What about locals who travel? What about locals who share links with others?

You brought up Cloudflare, when in reality this site went into their caching services configuration and purposefully enabled geofencing restrictions. They could have done this a million ways, and Cloudflare is basically irrelevant to this conversation, and is utterly fungible.

>What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible

Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment.

Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.

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

#105

Post by dnnddidiej »

nixgeek wrote: post #51
thewebguyd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer went through a similar process, not for a data center but for a large recycling yard/center. We had to buy the land first, and it was basically unproductive for 2.5 years of mostly waiting for permits, and it was already zoned industrial so no zoning changes were needed. The whole project was several million in expenses before even making a dollar. We aren't huge either, the permitting was not supposed to…

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…

2 seems good as the seller can still make money from the land in the meantime. It does make it unsellable to anyone else in that time though.

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

#106

Post by dgellow »

nixgeek wrote: post #26
manarth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end. 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 generati…

> 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?

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

#107

Post by dnnddidiej »

manarth wrote: post #32
nixgeek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end. 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 generati…

40,000 acres, aka 77 × Monaco's! TIL.

10 micro-Russias

400 vaticans

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

#108

Post by dgellow »

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.

But a datacenter doesn’t employ that many people, compared to mines. To develop a town you need to give a bunch of people a job, build small commerces, invest in the local infrastructure, so a real local economy can sustain itself. There is none of that with datacenters

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

#109

Post by JuniperMesos »

simianwords wrote: post #92
saulpw wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Taxes have relatively little to do with how good schools are, that is dominated by the quality of the students who live close enough to attend the schools.

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

#110

Post by cyberax »

nixgeek wrote: post #26
manarth wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end. 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 generati…

The density of modern racks makes me wonder why they would want so much space. There's just no way to power all of that.

Storage? Even that is now ultra-compact.

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