[bluGill]

I would guess the real problem is contractors are bottle-necked in good times, but not stupid enough to expand - knowing that bad times will come and they have to pay for all the expansion. (humans can be laid off, but you still need to make the payment on the bulldozer)

[scottlamb]

That makes sense. Although I have to pick on your example a bit: wouldn't they still need a concrete foundation for all that weight and thus still need bulldozers? Still unsure how much of the work they're actually avoiding.

[fc417fc802]

It's funny because at first I thought it made sense but the more I think about your question the more I'm skeptical. You still need the rack. Power distribution. Data lines. Cooling lines and whatever those connect back to. All the stuff that would have been embedded under the floor has to go somewhere (labor) and still has to be assembled (more labor). So they're saving time on what, the cement and steel shell?

Or is this a building permitting issue where for some reason the bureaucracy surrounding a permanent structure is expected to drag on for years but somehow they got the tents permitted rapidly?

[scottlamb]

> Or is this a building permitting issue where for some reason the bureaucracy surrounding a permanent structure is expected to drag on for years but somehow they got the tents permitted rapidly?

Good point; some permit loophole might make sense.

It occurs to me this also could still turn out to be a giant failure: these may all still be unpowered, empty tents. They might end up taking two to three years to turn on, might never get a critical permit at all, etc. I'm vaguely recalling some story from Google's past. They had an experimental datacenter (`pq` maybe?) built out of shipping containers. There was some way they had hoped this would be cheaper that (iirc) didn't work out at all because the local fire marshal declared each shipping container to be a full structure and thus an unexpected set of regulations applied. and/or each may also have been required to have an emergency power-off button for the entire facility, which were hit by accident more than one might hope. They never built a second datacenter with that design.

Also remembering that for a long while Google's Dalles, Oregon site had building 1, building 3, and an empty concrete slab between them called building 2. I suppose Meta could have done something similar and had the slabs ready to go long ago.