[athrowaway3z]

This is too dismissive of the impact.

Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.

The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.

To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.

That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.

[tonyarkles]

> now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time

You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).

In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.

> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.

There are two directions this idea can go:

- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.

- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.

If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:

- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police

- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters

The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.

[inigyou]

The rate of somebody actually being caught and handled by police is negligible. The private security still have to watch 24/7 and that's a private cost.

[tonyarkles]

I mean, they're talking to newspapers using their real names. And they're admitting what they've done.

If this was actually about real sabotage and causing real damage, the move would be to do something similar to what they're doing (incur structural damage) but keep quiet about it. Let them continue building out the DC and then watch the floor collapse when it gets loaded with server racks. Chipping out some concrete that's been clearly marked:

> mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint

Is a very minor inconvenience in a construction project of that scale compared to having the building collapse when it's partially filled with servers.

I'm not sure what the actual size of the on-site construction crew is, but one that's going up locally here is budgeted at $1.7B for the initial build-out and up to $12B for the total investment including all of the hardware that'll run inside it. A bunch of cameras, potentially perimeter radars, and a few security guards are really really minor additional costs. The facility they're building here is supposed to be 500,000 sq.ft. The cost of all of the additional security for managing this problem is probably less than a single rack of servers.

[Manuel_D]

But delaying the opening probably means that the decommissioning date is also pushed back. The total life span is probably unchanged.

[Timon3]

Doesn't that mean this was doubly effective? Since the electricity generation becomes greener over time, opening later means that the DC will cause less emissions over it's lifetime. And since DC chip TDP trends upwards, the total life span being unchanged means that newer & more power-hungry chips will be installed later, again leading to fewer emissions over the whole lifetime.