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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)

#161

Post by nixgeek »

ninalanyon wrote: post #150
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.

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?

Building on grade is much cheaper. There is in general plenty of surface area on Planet Earth.

Datacenters aren’t built next to Nordstrom. Theres just no reason to spend on engineering and construction that increases density like underground parking.

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

#162

Post by nixgeek »

cyberax wrote: post #110
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…

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.

Amazon is probably deploying in the range of 250,000 racks per year into AWS. That’s millions of square feet before you get into all the infrastructure around them so they’re powered, cooled and operated the way they need.

Figure on ~10 million square feet of conditioned DC space per year, approximately 5-10GW of additional power consumption to power those 250k cabinets (depending on the exact mixture of what’s in the racks — Compute, Storage, Network, Accelerators), and that’s just for one hyperscaler.

There are at least 5-7 companies in the hyperscaler weight class although likely none individually meaningfully larger than AWS, they’re the 800lb bear and everyone else is in the 500-750lb range.

It’s a lot. Datacenters also take long enough to build that a hyperscaler is pouring concrete today for shells they expect to serve real workloads in 2029 - 2031. What you’re seeing come online today in response to customer demand really started being built in 2021 - 2023.

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

#163

Post by mindslight »

jeffbee wrote: post #144
mindslight wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consum…

You would seem to be saying that grid infrastructure needs continual refreshing and improvement to continue carrying the same amount of power? That strikes me as a tall claim, given what I already know about electricity (electronic design and house wiring). I am open to entertaining it, but you've got to provide a reference or at least just describe the mechanism.

This is talking about the capital assets themselves, which are of course separate from regular maintenance like tree trimming.

About the only thing I can think of is something like a bulk of the grid infrastructure was built out 30/40/50/whatever years ago, and is now all reaching its expected lifetime all at once, and perhaps some types of equipment are strictly retired at the end of their lifespan lest they fail catastrophically.

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

#164

Post by nixgeek »

trollbridge wrote: post #99
culi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work from Starlink regularly and it’s just fine for meetings and everything else I do.

Meetings are usually under 10Mbps of downstream and 2Mbps upstream.

It’s simply false you need 1Gbps of “low latency” internet to work from home effectively unless your job is something like content production and working with huge files.

Producing for OnlyFans? Benefit from 1G to send raw to your editor.

Doing most other forms of work? Doesn’t require remotely close to this amount of bandwidth.

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

#165

Post by anvuong »

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.

10,000 square meters sound suspiciously small for a datacenter, even more so if you have to account for supporting facility? Maybe a small one? it's just 100m by 100m, which is smaller than most Walmart Supercenter.

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

#166

Post by cucumber3732842 »

thereisnospork wrote: post #149
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). N…

The permitting authority gets to pretend like it's not discretionary because the process has some "if we exercise out discretion to say no at this point then you sue us" thing to it that only megacorps with a legal team can afford to use

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

#167

Post by cucumber3732842 »

delfinom wrote: post #13
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.

Zoning laws. Many parts of the US but not all have land use zoning. The zoning for any property you buy is public record, so any business knows well in advance of what they are buying. If you want to deviate from the zoning you have to submit an application for that zoning variance which requires usually a community hearing. Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the co…

The community hearing is the easiest and cheapest part if your use is mundane.

The government will still screw you out of hundreds of thousands (mostly in the form of "pay these other people four figures for study X and plan Y" type requirements) to even get to that point though

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

#168

Post by CPLX »

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…

What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive.

They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the data center.

There is absolutely widespread dislike for data center construction in basically every region spanning almost every political axis in the United States right now.

There's polling on it. It's abysmal. The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question.

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

#169

Post by cucumber3732842 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #37
delfinom wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning laws. Many parts of the US but not all have land use zoning. The zoning for any property you buy is public record, so any business knows well in advance of what they are buying. If you want to deviate from the zoning you have to submit an application for that zoning variance which requires usually a community hearing. Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the co…

Zoning is only part of it. If a plot is already zoned industrial, but is empty, you still need to get the permitting for building construction, utility hookup, waste water & stormwater, environmental inspections, etc. It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.

Or better yet, farmer Johnson lets his D rate hay plot grow over because he never really thought it was worth it and the son that was managing that plot left for college.

Someone buys the plot 30yr later. They can't clear it and farm it without spending a quarter mil on environmental permitting because the government sees it as a pre-existing forest and the drainage ditch farmer Johnson's dad dug back in 1988 is now a stream (i.e. protected wetland) so they want the new owner to get the same permits that someone bulldozing a swamp for a strip mall would.

You see comparable fact patterns on every axis of regulation.

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

#170

Post by tptacek »

CPLX wrote: post #168
gottorf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive. They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the d…

They do not in fact consume large quantities of water, and "they consume lots of water" is a pretty good shibboleth for "this isn't going to be a productive discussion". Golf courses in the US consume more than 8x the water of all data centers combined.

Obviously, that's my response to your polling claims as well: people getting polled thing data centers are consuming all the water.

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