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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)

#31

Post by energy123 »

jeffbee wrote: post #6

Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,…

One of the rare cases where nimbys can't do damage because the hyper scalers will (and are) building their data centers across MENA, South Asia and SEA where they're welcomed with generous tax breaks and incentives.

Sending kilobytes of text over thousands of miles is a lot easier than piping energy or housing across distance!

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

#32

Post by manarth »

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…

40,000 acres, aka 77 × Monaco's!

TIL.

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

#33

Post by nixgeek »

LeFantome wrote: post #15
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.

us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each. So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individ…

AWS publicly stated I think in 2021 that the larger availability zones in US East 1 consisted of 17-18 datacenters each. It’s likely grown a lot since, and they recently announced AZ7 will be online in Maryland soon, so they must be running out of ability to grow the ones in NoVA.

I can’t find a link now but it was one of the re:Invent talks like Peter DeSantis briefly explaining AZs before he dug into how Amazon optimizes their concrete mixtures to be more environmentally friendly or something…

All things point to that being the biggest region any hyperscaler has in the world, and several gigawatts of power consumption.

James Hamilton also gave a talk in 2021 about AWS having crossed 20 million Nitro cards deployed and 12GW power consumed —

https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksandpapers/JamesHamilton2022101...

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

#34

Post by dylan604 »

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.

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

#35

Post by thewebguyd »

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.

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 take that long it but a real strain on the business.

So yeah, you're correct. The current process favors large firms, at least those large enough to absorb the cost for multiple years or however long permitting takes, which in some municipalities can be a very, very long time.

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

#36

Post by Scroll_Swe »

jeffbee wrote: post #6

Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome. Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources. The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,…

[flagged]

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

#37

Post by thewebguyd »

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…

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.

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

#38

Post by Scroll_Swe »

jeffbee wrote: post #14
trollbridge wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us would like to keep our “infinite” water resources which actually aren’t infinite. I live beneath two transmission lines (overlapping, I guess, but not intersecting) and would prefer no data centre built here. Why? Because it will provide me no benefit whatsoever, reduce my property value, and worsen my quality of life due to things like light pollution and noise. If data centre operators would fix these th…

I support in principle the rights of towns to set their own land use rules, but on the larger societal picture I don't support people benefiting from things like intermodal shipping, goods distribution, and information services that they refuse to host. So I perceive a certain hypocrisy in this story.

I kind of agree but I live in a city in Sweden.

Should I not be able to use youtube or order online because we don't have a DC right next door?

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

#39

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

Notably, this location is not far from where the Foxconn facility was going to be installed (the "eighth wonder of the world", 10k+ jobs, yada yada). After that debacle, I can imagine local residents are deeply skeptical of new big development projects.

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

#40

Post by deely3 »

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.

And don't forget about kids safety!
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