[delecti]

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.

[manarth]

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.

[nixgeek]

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]

> 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]

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.

[nixgeek]

Amazon is probably deploying in the range of 250,000 racks per year into AWS. That’s millions of square feet before you get into all the infrastructure around them so they’re powered, cooled and operated the way they need.

Figure on ~10 million square feet of conditioned DC space per year, approximately 5-10GW of additional power consumption to power those 250k cabinets (depending on the exact mixture of what’s in the racks — Compute, Storage, Network, Accelerators), and that’s just for one hyperscaler.

There are at least 5-7 companies in the hyperscaler weight class although likely none individually meaningfully larger than AWS, they’re the 800lb bear and everyone else is in the 500-750lb range.

It’s a lot. Datacenters also take long enough to build that a hyperscaler is pouring concrete today for shells they expect to serve real workloads in 2029 - 2031. What you’re seeing come online today in response to customer demand really started being built in 2021 - 2023.

[gottorf]

They're called hyperscalers for a reason.

[manarth]

40,000 acres, aka 77 × Monaco's!

TIL.

[dnnddidiej]

10 micro-Russias

400 vaticans

[anvuong]

10,000 square meters sound suspiciously small for a datacenter, even more so if you have to account for supporting facility? Maybe a small one? it's just 100m by 100m, which is smaller than most Walmart Supercenter.

[ninalanyon]

How much parking does a data centre need, and why is it not placed underneath the building, underground? Why do cars have to take up so much land?

[nixgeek]

Building on grade is much cheaper. There is in general plenty of surface area on Planet Earth.

Datacenters aren’t built next to Nordstrom. Theres just no reason to spend on engineering and construction that increases density like underground parking.

[dogcomplex]

It also buffers for all the surrounding properties which would otherwise complain about noise.

[jubilanti]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[CPLX]

> 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.

[gottorf]

> 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

Why? There aren't much "local resources tied up" since it's land that isn't that valuable for the most part. DCs, once built, don't emit fumes or loud noises, or make traffic worse like other industrial land use might. They just sit there quietly and generate tax revenue for the locality.

Sure, there aren't many ongoing jobs at an operating DC. But I can't see why it's one of the worst possible industrial uses, from the point of view of the residents around one.

> data centers are proving to be profoundly unpopular

From what I can tell, this is just from a combination of AI being unpopular plus opportunistic fearmongering on the part of politicians.

[tptacek]

The bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center". Like: if you have the option of getting the Boeing plant, get the Boeing plant! Racine County does not have that option. Meanwhile, the happy sounding businesses there --- like the duck farm --- are actually major polluters, and more problematic for the region than a data center.

The people opposing data centers oppose them everywhere, including in the middle of the desert in Utah, which really gives away the game.

[dehrmann]

> he bigger thing here is just the idea that the alternatives are "Boeing assembly plant" or "data center".

This is a false dichotomy, though. That region has enough land that you could do both. There just isn't much demand for manufacturing in the Upper Midwest right now.

[CPLX]

What you're saying is just factually incorrect. Data centers absolutely are loud and they're disruptive.

They're not good for the environment. They consume large quantities of water, typically, and huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else by driving up demand and causing capital infrastructure needs that are financed by everybody, not just the data center.

There is absolutely widespread dislike for data center construction in basically every region spanning almost every political axis in the United States right now.

There's polling on it. It's abysmal. The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question.

[gottorf]

> The assumption that all these people are stupid sheep probably won't be a productive way to approach this public policy question

I agree, and I do not assume that these people are stupid sheep. However, having said that:

> Data centers absolutely are loud

Compared to undeveloped land, sure. Compared to other uses of industrially-zoned land? Most likely not. I've been to a lot of datacenters. They're not very loud from the outside.

> They consume large quantities of water

I honestly do not understand why they don't just build closed-loop systems, or geothermal where they have a closed loop with the ground acting as the heat sink. Open-loop systems where they consume water just to evaporate sounds stupid to me. But I don't know how common that is.

Politicians showing off in front of the camera with a dirty jug of water, of course, is just grandstanding and has no real relation to datacenters other than they made construction happen.

> huge, absolutely staggering amounts of energy, which typically has the effect of raising rates for everybody else

This isn't just true of datacenters. They're building an aluminum plant near me that will consume on the order of 100+ MW, which is comparable to a fairly large DC. Any other large industrial plant would consume a lot of electricity, but nobody's blaming them for utility capital investment needs.

[tptacek]

They do not in fact consume large quantities of water, and "they consume lots of water" is a pretty good shibboleth for "this isn't going to be a productive discussion". Golf courses in the US consume more than 8x the water of all data centers combined.

Obviously, that's my response to your polling claims as well: people getting polled thing data centers are consuming all the water.

[juliusdavies]

It would make more sense to complain about plants consuming sunlight than it does to complain about data centers consuming water.

[CPLX]

You guys really don't get it, do you?

You've got these people going on TV and doing interviews saying that this new technology will be capable of replacing huge amounts of jobs.

The people that say that most jobs will be eliminated by AI are making direct threats of violence against the families of millions of people. Telling someone that they will no longer have any way of feeding their children is telling them that you're going to kill their family.

I'm not saying this to convince you that that's true. You could make some counter-arguments to that, and I'm sure people will come along and do that. The point is to understand it that that's how it's perceived by the people hearing it.

And then to add insult to injury, they want to come do it in your town.

They want to pitch a giant "development" project. But remember nobody ever wants “development” except for the fact that it might bring jobs and economic growth, to them, not you living somewhere else.

Meanwhile, you've already told them that the reason we need so many more data centers all of a sudden is specifically so that we can eliminate whatever jobs are left that we didn't get a chance to eliminate over the last several decades when we exported most of the jobs we could to different countries.

By the way we're the same assholes who said "trust us" last time, and pitched the idea that it would lead to a prosperous future for everyone. Instead you made money off sending the jobs to china, capturing all excess value with software, and addicting our children to opioids.

And your next exciting offer for us is a giant windowless building that will take up open land, nature, and yes, water and electricity, and employ almost nobody.

People don't feel like they control a whole lot, but they do have some ability to complain about this thing happening where they live.

The actions of people opposing these data centers are completely rational. If I'm trying to make one point, that's it.

The actually interesting part of this back and forth on HN is that Silicon Valley (aka "tech") culture has grown so fundamentally rotten at its core that not only do people not have values that place humans first, they can't even recognize when other people do.

[LeFantome]

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.

[nixgeek]

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...

[LeFantome]

If so, us-east-1 may be over 1000 acres of floor space. For comparison, Disney World is 600 acres and Central Park is about 850.

[jeffbee]

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.

[dqv]

Stormwater ponds are the bare minimum, not a deal sweetener. A deal sweetener would be an ecological management plan which demonstrates a true desire to limit the environmental impacts of this development as much as possible. And no, a storm pond company that just pours chemicals into the water to control algae and plants invasive privets around does not demonstrate that.

You're saying the data center has a small footprint, but it does not. You don't need that much stormwater pond if you don't have giant impervious surfaces.

Deal sweetener is footprint (buildings, parking lots, and substation) being 1/6 of the land with the other 5/6 dedicated to nature preservation.

Not all wide open space is created equal. If it's wide open space with Eurasian grasses that get cut every few weeks, it's useless and has 0 benefit to the local ecology. Even if they weren't cut, they're still do very little for the ecology in the area.

If those forests don't have keystone tree species, then it's the same.

The people running these companies are so incompetent, they can't even do greenwashng right.

[jeffbee]

I think you're a little miscalibrated on "giant impervious surface". The 244-acre site in question would have had three data halls, a substation, and one assumes parking lots and aprons. Here's a 300-acre Walmart distribution center in the same region. It has about 100 acres of concrete. I think that's a lot more than the data center would have had.

https://www.google.com/maps/search/Walmart+Distribution+Cent...

[dqv]

That's not how stormwater management works. Land elevation, adjacent land, the profile of the land (how much groundwater is there?) on which the structure is built (and probably even more that I'm not considering) all affect how big of a retention/detention pond is needed. And these requirements change over time when it is discovered that older sites' management techniques failed to adequately manage stormwater. The Walmart site was built at least two decades ago, no? That's enough time for stormwater management guidance and policy to change.

Even then, it is improper to assume anything about the stormwater management needs of one site based on another unrelated site. But even then, Walmart's site seems to be completely surrounded by stormwater management. Even the northwest corner of the site is a detention basin. [0]

The most obvious and logical conclusion to be made here is that an engineer told Microsoft they needed to have stormwater management of that size, so that's what they put in their plans. No sweetness, just lawsuit prevention.

If they want to be sweet, they should be building huge nature preserves (and they have enough money to afford it) into these plans instead of trying to be greedy by building the largest possible structures (they think) they can get away with.

[0]: https://beacon.schneidercorp.com/Application.aspx?App=DodgeC...

[mapt]

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.