[arjie]

Am I the only one who wants a datacenter in his backyard? I actually went down a little over a year ago to get a cabinet down at Hosting.com’s old location round the corner only to find that they’ve been gone from there (and the DC business) for a few years now and the new owners have kept it fallow. I have to drive down to Fremont for a similar price point now. I would gladly have paid 30% more to just go down the street in SF’s SOMA. Perhaps I should have considered Digital Realty’s facility down on Paul Ave but they’re harder to get a small system up on.

It does mean I try to make sure I get it right when I set up. But it also means that if I goofed some cable management then that’s it because I’m not going back to fix it till next time.

Something that would be cool for the future would be if luxury apartment buildings offered their own cabinets for the use of residents. Haha, a man can dream.

[sgerenser]

It would be worth separating out the “traditional” data centers (which offer things like colocation, and mostly run pretty standard CPU-bound or network-bound workloads) from “AI” data centers (which have racks and racks of extremely dense GPUs or accelerators). It’s really the latter that people should be concerned about due to their much larger scale, higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.

[arjie]

I do have GPUs running there and I'd be running them denser if I'd already paid for the power. To be honest, there's no room on 3rd Street to put turbines next to the DC there so if they wanted to put in AI they'd have to upgrade the power delivery. I don't mind that so much. Besides, most DC operators would rather pay for power than do on-site generation. That's just an artifact of what we disincentivize. Water always finds the lowest point and so on.

[cucumber3732842]

> higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.

It speaks volumes about the degree to which we've regulated and NIMBY'd and everything else'd utility build out that on site generation in any case other than a blackout so pencils out anywhere in the US save perhaps remote regions of Alaska

[oceanplexian]

I’d love more datacenters so I can colo my pet projects and startup like I was doing in the early 2000s

The point where we decided we would put all infrastructure in N. Virginia, stop owning hardware and rent it from a corporation charging 10x markup was right about when the Internet started going downhill.

[kemotep]

I live in rural Ohio and there is like 6? Colo places within an hour’s drive.

When I lived outside of Orlando there was like a dozen in Orlando alone.

If you look up Colo options in your area, what is lacking? These new datacenters are high density AI hypercalers. They are not traditional Colo DC’s. It’s more like a whole new AWS AZ is getting slapped down. More of the same cloud computing you’re complaining about.

[kube-system]

If anything, existing colos are going to be hurt by what's going on right now, as they're getting all of the political backlash from the AI hyperscaler bullshit going on.

[kibwen]

Datacenters are extremely loud, you definitely don't want one in your approximate backyard. Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.

[chrisandchris]

Actually cannot confirm. I'm once or twice outside of the Zurich datacenters and I really did not ever realize the sound outside.

[kube-system]

Some datacenters are loud. Some are quiet.

[Swizec]

> Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.

Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.

These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.

Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.

We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.

[bnop]

I would do a little due diligence here if I were you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo

[arjie]

Realistically, I'm not going to watch a video by a fellow whose entire content reel is big yellow and red capital letters saying "capitalism sucks" imposed on a horrified face. I find that these people have poor epistemic discipline. Besides, the chap has never been inside a datacenter, and not only is that a pretty big difference from me but all the significant events of my life have happened within one kilometre of one here in SF.