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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

It's bizarre that Digital Realty wants to put a DC in a town centre. Surely the latency disadvantage from being outside city limits is neligible.

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Don't know about US, but I work within European Datacenter where we intend to have excess heat to be used for residential building heating [1]. You must be in proximity of the consumer for this to be possible. Not necessarily center is needed, but even then, DCs can be pretty :)

For example our office is heated using heatpump that has >22C of water heated by equipment as a source.

https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/pres...

> excess heat to be used for residential building heating

In the late 90s I worked at an insurance company in leafy Surrey[1]. I was told that they used to use their IBM mainframe to heat the swimming pool[2] effectively for free; when they upgraded they had to buy and run a heating system for the pool as the new mainframe didn't pump out enough heat.

[1] In England, south west suburbs of London to be precise.

[2] yes it had an indoor pool, badminton courts, outdoor tennis courts and other facilities - a great place to work.

Well we can hope that AI will become power efficient :) May be a headache for DCs for sure, but what can you do.

And the way things are structured is that heating is amended and not exactly a direct connection to residential buildings at the mercy of DC load.

> residential buildings at the mercy of DC load.

Thousands of people Google "why is my building cold" causing the AI DC to wake up and pump out heat. AI sees the heat and reports "heating is on, you're fine" then shuts down.

They are now stuck in a cycle.

It is crazy how you see so many datacenters getting built in places of high land value such as say northern virginia. Why not just build them in west virginia and build twice as many for the same spend? They'd probably even let you burn coal to power them.

I'm guessing it's to do with regulation. There's probably some policy document that says a certain org needs to be able to access the physical servers within a certain amount of time, and so they need to be nearby, even though nobody ever does the accessing.

DC would be the kind of place with a lot of government contractors that would have this kind of stipulation, is my guess.

I suspect it's driven by availability of existing grid infrastructure (so they don't have to wait for upgrades) and ease of permitting; the contents of the building and indeed running costs are so high that the land value is much less relevant.

Power, fiber, people.

Power is the biggest one here in Texas, so much so even this laissez-faire state has stopped new permits for data centers. All the inner connect space for grids is used up and the wait for hardware and installs is massive.

So much so we're seeing private grids being setup for data centers.

There is a lot of electrical supply and demand is high plus incentives from Virginia itself and proximity to DC. It’s already a data center dense market

Nearby skilled labor, police/fire infrastructure willing to handle it, and ease of demo/tours/sales for clients to install their racks. Also much more stable power.

West Virginia also has a lot of coal. I wonder why the current Admin doesn't encourage DCs to be built next to coal. Coal communities don't care much for any regulations, DC development should be perfectly fine. Hyperscalers can brag about 100% coal powered AI.

You would think, but I live in a tiny pop state that is barely thought about, and we have coal, but the hyperscale datacenter project did get pushback. Almost entirely political. No one had an opinion in January. But around summer something flipped. I also work with an existing datacenter here, and there was a similar thing. People were going on about how cool it was, etc, for years, and then suddenly, wham, sentiment changed.

1 datacenter is neat. 1000, maybe not so much.

To add, the numbers are actually this crazy.

https://dcmap.us/states/texas/

>Texas has 623 tracked data center facilities and projects: 349 operational, 101 under construction, 156 planned, 2 paused, and 15 inactive or historical. Reported or announced power totals 96.1 GW, including 85.4 GW tied to planned or under-construction projects.

This is for just one state.

>4,998 facilities and projects nationwide, with 374.7 GW in reported or announced power figures. Of that, 318.6 GW is tied to planned or under-construction projects. Climate-risk and water-stress labels summarize current records with those fields. The directory retains 150 inactive or historical records. States are ordered by current reported or announced power.

When it all goes bust, at least you'll have some real estate.

You'd have to pay folks to move to the middle of nowhere.

Low-latency fiber interconnects to other nearby data centers are a core feature of datacenters.

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