[scotty79]

You can't make desktop computer 4 times larger but there's very little preventing you form putting 4 racks where you had 1 before. If the floor space is the expensive part of data center then probably some incentives are misaligned.

[simne]

For about price of land and connectivity - in large city land price begin on few millions dollars per square kilometer, and usage of cable channels could cost from 50$ per meter (easy could be 200$/m).

Plus, space arrange could last years.

Heat dissipation in range of megawatts could be just prohibited by local regulations.

So, space in large cities is very serious problem, and for business it is usually easier to "compress" as much computing power as possible in one rack.

[IAmBroom]

> in large city land price begin on few millions dollars per square kilometer,

There's little need to put large datacenters in downtown Chicago and Manhattan.

[sbarre]

Bigger chips = more distance to cover for your electrons = more power required = more generated heat = slower throughput for your data.

Surely you don't believe that the entire chip industry had not thought of "wait what if we just make the chips bigger".

[moffkalast]

AMD hiding Threadripper behind their back: Uh yeah what a terrible idea, we definitely didn't actually do that. Making a CPU that's twice the size, how ridiculous would that be right?!

[sbarre]

You found an exception to my two-line generalization. Congrats!

[fuzzfactor]

The main reason to reduce feature size since quite some time has been to make more money per wafer, and faster.

Same reason that so much work was put into increasing wafer diameter over the decades.

More chips per wafer means a lot.

Much more than for performance sake.

[simne]

You cannot place dc anywhere, in large cities space is extremely constrained, and land is extremely expensive.

Also big problem - connectivity - you cannot place DC where it cannot be connected to power grid and to very powerful network.

So yes, DC floor space is severely limited.

And the third issue - last decades, rack servers dissipate extremely large amounts of heat, I hear numbers up to tens Kilowatts per rack, which is just hard to dissipate with air cooling (as example, all IBM Power servers have option of liquid cooling, but this is totally different price range).