| ▲ | delecti 5 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | manarth 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | nixgeek 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 generation which takes additional space. Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute. | | |
| ▲ | dgellow an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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? | |
| ▲ | cyberax an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | manarth 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 40,000 acres, aka 77 × Monaco's! TIL. | | |
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| ▲ | tptacek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | CPLX 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > 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 skilled jobs, and knock-on effects with local service providers and OEM vendors. |
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| ▲ | jubilanti 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I assume you mean AWS us-east-1. It isn't a single data center. It is a cluster of data centers around Northern Virginia. |
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| ▲ | LeFantome 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres. Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area. |
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| ▲ | nixgeek 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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... |
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| ▲ | mapt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Based on a majority of games regions, US-East-1 is scattered properties in a <100 square mile area near Dulles Airport in Virginia, associated with an Internet backbone junction and former AOL campus in small town called Ashburn. |
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| ▲ | jeffbee 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site. |
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| ▲ | badlibrarian 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
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| ▲ | bigdick1 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| My data center is bigger than yours. |
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| ▲ | sterlind 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | it's not the size of the chip, it's the motion of the digitalocean. |
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