[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.