[VoidWarranty]

Not to be insensitive about the humanitarian and economic situation, but, I am curious why there are data centers in that region at all? It just seems horribly inefficient from a cooling and electricity standpoint. Not to mention water.

My pessimistic assumption is that Amazon said "yes" to handouts from regional government efforts to be relevant in tech, and that those data centers dont really matter to anyone but local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.

[tiew9Vii]

Middle East isn’t some 3rd world. If you can imagine futuristic cities, rich Middle East countries are already living in them with all the oil wealth.

They have phones, computers, digital services just like the US and Europe. Makes sense they want a data center in the region, close to them just like the US and Europe have data enters close to their users.

[esalman]

I have lived in the Middle east (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia) for ~10 years. I have also lived in the US for 10 years. Infrastructure in the Middle East (roads and bridges, public transportation) is actually better than USA. Poverty is lower because the government has oil money and everybody (citizens) is on welfare. Some countries like Iran are more educated than the USA. Saudi Arabia has the biggest supercomputer in the world and my college friends who went there for grad studies got duplex villas to live in whereas I toiled on 20k annual salary in the US. Of course there are issues- human rights, minorities, cultural issues and racism- but it's not like those problems don't exist in the US.

The data centers are there because customers are there. If you stumble on to a twitch streamer or tiktoker from Dubai, you'll find there's are thousands more.

[citadel_melon]

By what measure are Iranians more educated than US citizens?

Are you also claiming infrastructure in Iran/Iraq/Saudi Arabia is better than the US, or just Saudi Arabia?

[andrepd]

Slight tangent, but to me futuristic cities are actually places like Amsterdam, with cozy streets and bike lanes everywhere, not places like Dubai with 16-lane freeways and a quasi-slave underclass staffing the tacky malls.

[mlinhares]

Its sad that people think the "future" is all about owning stuff for yourself and not what the city can provide to its population.

[FpUser]

Why is it said? Being independent to the degree possible is the best state for human being I think.

[patmorgan23]

Do you think we became the dominant species by being independent loners, or by forming complex interdependent groups?

[FpUser]

I said "independent to the degree possible", not absolutely.

I do not live in a binary world. I accept things in between.

Being part of group should be voluntary, not forced

What I definitely do not want is my life to be dictated by a few imbeciles at the top who are bought by large corps to pretend to be "by the people for the people".

[tomjakubowski]

A city whose citizens mostly drive is less independent than a city whose citizens mostly ride bicycles. Bicycling infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper to maintain than the same for heavier, motorized vehicles. It's not just the roadways: you need service stations, tire shops, parking lots and garages. Gasoline engine cars need gasoline distributed to stations all over the place and emissions testing. All of these things take up lots of space because motor vehicles are big.

All that bicycles really need are a (much narrower) right of way and some cheap pavement. Maintenance can be done all at home, even in a small apartment. The apparent independence available to motor vehicle drivers is an illusion afforded by massive private and public investment.

[FpUser]

In what crystal ball did you see me saying anything about bicycles? I am long time cyclist, EUC rider and have car for cases when it is needed.

[orwin]

Maybe, but the "loneliness epidemic" articles and frankly, my own experience lead me to believe that independance is overated. Community is not though.

[subw00f]

Independent? You say independent, I say parasitic. Just like any ruling class of the Middle East, especially the UAE. They’re not independent, they’re very much dependent on the semi slave labor they manage to exploit. Anything that makes life worth living is the result of collective labor. People coming together and building or learning upon previous knowledge. Hell, even your understanding of yourself comes from the social relationships you form during your formative years. This desire to be what amounts to an outcast is a defect, an abnormality imposed by the mode of production that organizes the world right now.

[FpUser]

>" This desire to be what amounts to an outcast"

I think you have to get off your meds first

[copperx]

I can't imagine the logic chain that made you come to that conclusion.

[eli_gottlieb]

But buying a lot of tacky stuff isn't independence in any meaningful way. It's just choosing a lifestyle with a larger dependency surface.

[FpUser]

This sounds like a wise parent explaining some higher truth to a kid. Except that it is not truth but some our of blue baseless conclusion you've managed to somehow extract from my sentence.

[b00ty4breakfast]

I guess it depends on if you were a Gibson fan or an Asimov fan as a teen

[ifwinterco]

It's 40+ degrees every day in the summer with high humidity, nobody who can afford a car is cycling in any of these cities.

It's not really about town planning it's just how it is

[cactusplant7374]

A lot of people don’t like bikes. I am down for salty licorice though.

[sumedh]

Is it because they’re used to cars from a young age?

[cactusplant7374]

People don't like bicycling in the same way a lot of people don't like football. It's just a sport preference.

[spookie]

Eh, I think its just that the infrastructure rewards having a car and not bikes. I thought the same before, only after experiencing for years the small things that make it possible, have I come around to it.

The little Honda City/Today with its trunk scooter from the 80's was ahead of its time, really. Its a path one should look at in large metropolitan areas. With electric bikes, even cities with large elevation deltas have a chance nowadays.

[sumedh]

Any citations for that?

[echoangle]

If you take futuristic to mean „looking like the future“, it think the second option is sadly more futuristic for some people

[andrepd]

Indeed, but sprawling lead-smoke infested freeways is the stuff of the 1950s; bike lanes and playgrounds and grassy tram tracks is what some cities are starting to do just now! So actually more futuristic, objectively speaking :)

[g-mork]

This is a hilarious comparison given Amsterdam's own history with regard to immigration. Not even historically but contemporarily too.. Just Eat, probably the largest employer of bargain bucket labour across Europe today is headquartered in Amsterdam

[refulgentis]

It was snippy and unclear, after the edit, its that and weak. I’d motion you just delete. Not sure literal slaves is comparable to a company that pays bargain basement salaries

[g-mork]

It is hilarious, because it is blinded by our own self-imposed optics. It has been our policy to import droves of immigrant workers who have little hope but to take up gig economy jobs often illegally and remain fixed at the same (or worse) levels of economic status as the day they arrived in the country. Yes in Dubai they simply confiscate passports. At least they're honest about it

[refulgentis]

The kafala system confiscates your passport. You can't quit, can't switch employers, can't leave the country. People die in labor camps building these vanity projects. The UN classifies it as modern slavery.

A Just Eat rider in Amsterdam can quit tomorrow and sue their employer. Those aren't the same thing. You can criticize Europe's treatment of immigrant workers without pretending the difference is just honesty.

[brcmthrowaway]

And yet Amsterdam has a world famous seedy district

[reaperducer]

And yet Amsterdam has a world famous seedy district

What world-class city doesn't?

And if you think there aren't hookers in Dubai, then I don't know what to tell you.

[RobertoG]

Actually, there are probably not a lot of hookers in Dubai at this moment. Most are probably back to Europe (or stuck in the airport).

[squibonpig]

As I understand it in most cases they have enormous wealth disparities, so like the rich in Dubai have pampered tourist experiences but there's also serious issues with like lacking basic sewer infrastructure for ordinary people.

[defrost]

Indeed.

It's much like the USofA in that regard.

[xtracto]

It's basically Capitalism.

[stuaxo]

But with proper slavery

[amelius]

Isn't that exactly the kind of environment where Amazon thrives? Exploit the rich and the poor at the same time.

[lemoncookiechip]

Americans seem to think the middle-east is some dystopian place where everyone is near poverty living in mudhuts, when places like Iran have a higher level of literacy than the USA, with more female college graduates.

There's definitely a lot of issues that need to be addressed at a cultural and social-economical level in places like Dubai exploiting migrant workers like slaves, the UAE, etc... but America has plenty of issues back home at a state by state case. Poverty, infrastructure falling apart, lack of education, lack of affordable health care, lack of job opportunity, high criminality, drug epidemics, etc... Some states feel like entirely different countries when compared to something like New Hampshire.

Even places like NYC and California which are economic hubs have this wide disparity of class, with entire communities of homeless populating the streets at crazy numbers that would make other nations blush (Cali has well over 100k).

[bathtub365]

I’m not really surprised. The US (and their allies) has made a concerted effort over a number of decades to turn them into to the third world. The current sitting US president has threatened to blast them into “oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. A lot of imagery of middle eastern countries seen in the west is of the places they’ve collectively destroyed.

[Zetaphor]

One thing we've always been exceptional at is thinking we're exceptional

[happymellon]

> places like Dubai exploiting migrant workers like slaves

Heck you can even compare like with like, and point to H1b visas.

The entire point of that program is to bring in people who you can pay below standard wages, and who will work those 12 hour days for you.

[Synthetic7346]

Are you comparing H1bs to slavery? That's a ridiculous take

[surgical_fire]

So... The future is Dubai? I am still to hear a better argument in favor of extinction.

This reminds me of a quote from "Stranger Than Fiction":

> Harold: "I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes?"

> Dr. Hilbert: "Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes"

[augusto-moura]

Even 3rd world have those nowadays, unless you talking the more troubled of countries. TBH "3rd world" as a concept is quite outdated.

I'm a bit skeptical on how "futuristic" the cities are. There's a lot of money, sure, but from I can tell the projects are pharaonic in a lot of ways, including being out of touch with the practicality of such projects.

[nutjob2]

If you can imagine dystopian cities, rich Middle East countries are already living in them with all the oil wealth.

[haliskerbas]

San Francisco feels the same s/oil/tech/g

[r0yadar]

I could never relax in such a place. Will always feel spooked

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>They have phones, computers, digital services just like the US and Europe.

Wow, really?!

[toast0]

There's a fair amount of nearby customers. There's decent connectivity via undersea cables to Europe, East Asia, and Africa. UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are very encouraging of outside investments in their countries.

I did some work with hosts on GCP in the region and you get fun things like hosts in Israel has bad routes to customers in nearby countries and vice versa, though. I don't know if AWS has access to better routing. Definitely a case where physical distance doesn't really correspond with network distance.

[c0balt]

To provide some practical examples, Dubai is it's own region in some online games like Valorant. It has relatively good connectivity to the region and there are enough customers there

[einszwei]

Data centers can run on closed loop cooling systems which doesn't need continuous water supply. Only bottleneck is Energy supply which the MEA area doesn't lack.

[InvisibleUp]

Hundreds of millions of people live in the Middle East and a lot of large corporations are based there. Likely they thought it would be profitable, and likely they saw some decent use.

[bawolff]

I imagine the same reason they have a data center in places like Sao Paulo. More locally centred businesses want the low ping, and AWS wants to be your cloud compute provider of choice no matter where your target audience is.

[rkagerer]

If anyone here is involved in making decisions about where to locate such centers, I'd love to hear more about how geopolitical risk factors in, and whether you plan and price out contingencies (e.g. "This is near an unstable area, worst case is we write off $###M, but after Y years it breaks even. And the site is better in these other factors than alternative Z over there..."). Is it similar to factoring for geophysical instabilities (e.g. earthquake/tsunami zone) or other risks? Or would this type of event catch you completely offguard? I'm guessing insurance riders specifically exclude these types of risks.

[zipy124]

Insurance. No need to write off anything or take a loss, just a slightly increased yearly cost. The cost of said insurance is likely going to be very high for a long time now though.

[rdl]

I insure a bunch of big datacenters (crypto mining, AI); there are really two main drivers of cost of insurance per $ of equipment:

1) Internal risks and controls within the datacenter (the company involved and their operating history, fires, flood, etc,) -- for a sufficiently "good" datacenter, you can assume it gets maxed out in quality, or at least to the point where it's no longer efficient to spend more. Most of these risks also cause service disruptions, so if you're building for high availability anyway, the rest of this stuff is usually handled as part of that. Essentially, if you're too cheap to build a good enough datacenter to max this out, you're not getting insurance anyway in most cases, so it's not a variable factor so bunch as binary or maybe a few broad risk bands (ISO tier for datacenters).

2) External risks. This is mostly natural catastrophe ("nat cat" or "cat risk"); usually there's one dominant driver of that ("severe convective storms" in Texas; floods and hurricanes in places like Florida; earthquakes in California). In some places it's multiple risks (Japan has both earthquake/tsunami and typhoon). This drives the majority of insurance premium.

War risk, geopolitical, political risk, terrorism, SRCC ("strikes, riots, and civil commotion") are in a third category -- often essentially not a factor (e.g. for a $200mm facility in rural Texas), but often handled through special programs at a national level or specialty insurance. A lot of normal policies exclude or let the client buy-back that part of the risk.

As my personal interests in war zones, drones, etc. and professional interests in crypto, AI, and datacenters seem to have converged, looking forward to seeing "quality of air defense artillery/integrated air defense system" as well as "comprehensive quick reaction force capable of dealing with national-level threats" as elements of insurance underwriting for $50B AI datacenters/"AI factories" in the future. I assume in most cases this kind of stuff will be handled by national, military, defense, or civil defense parts of the government, but could easily be contracted as well. I don't think Oracle Cloud is likely to stand up their own private army though.

[wiml]

Sure, but insurance is just outsourcing that calculation to a third party. AWS is big enough that I would think they largely self-insure, though I don't know if they do.

[rkagerer]

My impression is most commercial insurance policies specifically exclude acts of war (and similar). The extent of systematic damage that can occur in such scenarios would easily put them into insolvency. There are exceptions for life insurance, maritime shipping, aviation etc. but I gather they're uncommon, often limited-time in nature and come with high premiums. I've never heard of the equivalent for buildings and contents. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

I also agree with the sibling comment that suggests even if there were outsourced options available, hyperscalers might do better to self-insure.

But regardless whether the company eats it, or pays it through insurance premiums, I'm still curious how this type of risk is planned for (to whatever degree it is) and accounted. I assume it must have been contemplated in a deliberate manner, somewhere on a scale of "We knew this could happen, considered x, y and z, decided the venture was justified, and here's how we planned for such a contingency" to "That was dumb siting and someone will be fired". Obviously anywhere you put a building entails some level of local risk.

As years as a volunteer firefighter we do a lot of risk management at the tactical level and have to think through assessment and potential consequences. There are lots of guidelines we learn to help produce sound decisions. But at the end of the day to apply them you may need to make a judgement call, and you need to be prepared for things to go wrong. In a way I guess I'm asking about the economic and operational equivalent at the scale of hundred-million dollar data centers.

https://xkcd.com/1737/

Ps. Like the original commenter said, I'm in no way meaning to be insensitive to the larger human and regional consequences.

[mnky9800n]

I think you are overfitting to temperature as a variable in this decision making equation.

[mbreese]

I think the easy answer is: because there are customers there. It’s a region full of major commercial and industrial companies. I can imagine that you’d want data centers close to where those customer are.

Technically, I can see challenges in power and cooling, but those can be overcome. The real question is- Are there enough customers in the region to support local data centers? I think that’s clearly yes.

[seany]

Data governance compliance is a huge issue for some industries. "The days can't leave the country" will drive AWSs normal customers to demand bespoke regions setup and turned on

[edgarvaldes]

Yes, I'm surprised no one else has commented on this. Some regulations require that at least some backups be located in the same country or region.

[uluyol]

Electricity? It's probably one of the best places in the world to have a solar+battery installation?

[watwut]

Why would water for data center be an issue there? They dont need to drink it.

It was business for those contries. Just like finance, travel and wgat have you.

[wiml]

Water is used for cooling. You take in liquid water, release water vapor, and the phase transition takes away a lot of heat. Otherwise you need to pump that heat into dry air, which is much more difficult (energy-expensive). It's the same thing you do when you sweat.

[bryan_w]

But it's not a significant amount, compared to other uses in a city. You know this, right?

[adjejmxbdjdn]

They have the cheapest oil in the world and in the future (and present) they will likely have cheap solar energy.

And until this fine misadventure, it was also possible they would get extremely cheap nuclear energy.

Given that the Gulf is fairly central, has tremendous flight connectivity, has tremendous capacity for business and business conference growth, Dubai was only looking to increase its share of global finance, law, and other major services, is a major center of shipping, is a region that has neutral to friendly relations with nearly every country, has 3rd world like cheap labor but first world like luxuries if you have the money, and a lot of money they were willing to spend on these data centers, it’s not the worst idea.

Of course, that whole plan has come crashing down now that having US bases has turned from an asset to a liability.

[disgruntledphd2]

I mean, that plan was basically never going to work long term, given climate change.

[elzbardico]

> local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.

Are you from another planet? They DO have a set at the table because gulf Sovereign Funds are one of the largest and most reliable LP pools available for VC funds for quite some time.

The current AI buildout is heavily dependent on Gulf money.

Oil is not forever and Sovereign Wealth Funds usually have goals that are not simply acruing direct investment returns, it makes sense that the folks deploying 100 billions tranches will have some say on where to put all those H100 their money will buy.

Nobody sane would predict Israel and the US would start this war.

[teleforce]

>Nobody sane would predict Israel and the US would start this war.

Israel predicted and started the war unless you consider they're insane [1].

[1] Iran is a distraction [video]:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640560

[elzbardico]

Well, it is a tall calling to pretend Netanyahu and Trump are well adjusted, psychologically sane men.

[someotherperson]

Yes, and also pushed for by the Israeli and US governments. Tech investment is part of the Abraham Accords - i.e this is part of the prerequisites for normalization of ties with Israel.

[vidarh]

There are customers there, some of whom are large enough to create significant demand just by insisting on their compute and storage being local.

[BurningFrog]

Closed-loop water cooling systems are common and use very little water, despite what you may hear from alarmists.

[gorgoiler]

I was thinking the same thing about cooling. I guess a high pressure heat pump can work in any environment if it compresses a gas up to a temperature that’s higher than ambient. Couple that with abundant cheap energy — sunny, oily, and gassy! — and it doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.

[echoangle]

You can use a heat pump for any realistic output temperature but the efficiency goes down the higher the temperature difference has to be.

As long as sun and wind aren’t the main energy sources there, it might be economical but I wouldn’t exactly call it reasonable.

[mememememememo]

My guess.

Edge compute. Data (coughlaugh) residency. Obsession with low latency on our 42Mb web pages.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

It's extremely efficient from an evaporative cooling perspective.

[jasomill]

Aside from the energy cost of desalination.

[Fairburn]

Once Iran ramps up, its going to be a free-for-all against all US data infrastructure. Iran has friends in low places so they don't have to do all of the dirty work themselves. This should be a wake-up call.

[XorNot]

Sovereign data requirements for government and business.

[paxys]

Because there are customers there