> what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with?

Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.

otherme123 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That makes no sense: are they going to use this datacenter exclusively for Nashville people use? We regularly access data from datacenters thousands of kilometers away, and the latency is acceptable. Not even pro-gamers would notice the latency increase if the datacenter moved 10 kilometers further in any direction, which is virtually empty in Nashville.

I live in Spain, and my latency to my VPS at Germany, 3,000 kilometers away, is 40 milliseconds. Good enough. A traceroute shows that I have to pass through Madrid (400 km away), with a ping of 5 ms. Do anyone believe that moving datacenters within neighborhoods to shave additional 5 or 10 km is noticeably good for the latency, when 100 km mean extra 1 ms on average? Apparently the Nashville neighbors don't give a shit about -0.1 ms latency.

We have a couple of small datacenters nearby. Luckily they are somewhat isolated from where people live, because the things are noisy at all times, and each year they add more capacity, more refrigeration towers and more noise (all efficiency gained at the CPU/GPU level is used to increase density, not to lower consumption or cooling needs). Nobody would want to live less than 200 meters away from them.

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kube-system 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If it’s a colo… yes, it would be primarily local customers. Data centers are not just for consumer B2C services. There’s a lot of stuff that runs in data centers that are both more important and more sensitive to latency or connectivity than video games.

Even for something as simple as a business that needs somewhere to run critical VDI hosts — then yes, they need low latency and somewhere that their techs can physically get to if they need to fix something.

You may also need interconnects to specific physical networks that are only available in certain places. You may need direct connections to partner equipment. This requires physical presence.

Colo space is not something you rent if a VPS is good enough for what you’re doing.

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conductr 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If they zoned it, then the city is saying “you will commute”. It doesn’t have to be unreasonably far away, just less convenient than a Walmart. Most people commute for work anyway, business rent storage/warehouse space in cheaper part of town than their office space, etc. Its hyperlocalness isn’t crucial to its function.

	▲	kube-system 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I commute 45 minutes to mine. That’s entirely reasonable for my use case. If you’re not doing something like HFT, then being in the same metro area is fine for most purposes. I was responding to why you wouldn’t want one in a different freakin country

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hackernud3s 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right? How do people not understand this? Have fun with your super-high latency when the DCs leave your city.

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3eb7988a1663 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The signal speed in fiber is some 200k km/s. If you go 10 miles outside of a city, you are adding 0.1ms ping, and you will have dramatically fewer pitch forks.

The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.

	▲	kube-system 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But if it’s a colo it’s unlikely to have many LLMs running there. The big AI datacenters are mostly purpose built.
	▲	bryan_w 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is this DC even for LLMs? I've not seen any sign of that. Considering that the initial build out was only 10MW, it seems unlikely that was the primary usecase.

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kube-system 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s not necessarily “super high” latency to connect to data centers at a distance. Whether or not it matters depends on the application, and for most consumer applications it isn’t a huge issue. For AI data centers it doesn’t really matter.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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