It's bizarre that Digital Realty wants to put a DC in a town centre. Surely the latency disadvantage from being outside city limits is neligible.

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jve 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't know about US, but I work within European Datacenter where we intend to have excess heat to be used for residential building heating [1]. You must be in proximity of the consumer for this to be possible. Not necessarily center is needed, but even then, DCs can be pretty :)

For example our office is heated using heatpump that has >22C of water heated by equipment as a source.

https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/pres...

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asdff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is crazy how you see so many datacenters getting built in places of high land value such as say northern virginia. Why not just build them in west virginia and build twice as many for the same spend? They'd probably even let you burn coal to power them.

	▲	lordnacho an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm guessing it's to do with regulation. There's probably some policy document that says a certain org needs to be able to access the physical servers within a certain amount of time, and so they need to be nearby, even though nobody ever does the accessing. DC would be the kind of place with a lot of government contractors that would have this kind of stipulation, is my guess.
	▲	pjc50 an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I suspect it's driven by availability of existing grid infrastructure (so they don't have to wait for upgrades) and ease of permitting; the contents of the building and indeed running costs are so high that the land value is much less relevant.
	▲	liquidpele an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Nearby skilled labor, police/fire infrastructure willing to handle it, and ease of demo/tours/sales for clients to install their racks. Also much more stable power.
	▲	firesteelrain an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There is a lot of electrical supply and demand is high plus incentives from Virginia itself and proximity to DC. It’s already a data center dense market