Facebook selects Kansas City for new $800M data center | Hacker News Reader

Facebook selects Kansas City for new $800M data center

governor.mo.gov

20 pointsWalterSobchak19 comments

Modern large-scale datacenters are pretty neat. I recommend visiting a datacenter if you ever spend a chunk of time working for one of the FAANG companies... as a software engineer, I used to just think of it as a big room where you stick computers, and it kind of is that, but at the same time there is a lot of advanced work around power systems, cooling systems, and all this hardware that I usually have the luxury of ignoring.

I visited the Facebook datacenter in Fort Worth and was surprised how many people there formerly worked on submarines. I guess the jobs are similar, you are maintaining a system of advanced electronics in a controlled environment.

What if someone views HTML source code there? Did they put that into consideration?

I don’t understand this comment. Would you mind explaining?

I think its about Missouri pretending that a journalist writing about publicly exposed information in HTML was a criminal violation

Missouri governor accused a journalist of "hacking" a government site for viewing the HTML source and discovering that a bunch of teachers' social security numbers were embedded in the page.

Instead of thanking him for finding and reporting the flaw so they could address the actual issue, the governor made legal threats.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/viewing-website-...

This quote from the education commissioner cracked me up:

In the letter to teachers, Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven said “an individual took the records of at least three educators, unencrypted the source code from the webpage, and viewed the social security number (SSN) of those specific educators.”

"Unencrypted" by reading English-based text with his eyeballs :)

How many people are needed to staff a modern data center?

It says up to 100 jobs which is remarkably efficient.

They do hire a lot of contractors for facility works. And keep in mind, all these jobs are usually very highly paid. These highly paid individuals will spend their money locally, want to buy a house. It's definitely good for the economy.

Having many data centers in one spot, attracts even more data centers. Look at Loudon County. One of the highest income counties in all the U.S.

Loudoun was super wealthy before the data centers started springing up. It was where old VA money had their horse farms and wineries. What changed was a huge influx of very well paid tech and natsec jobs after 9/11. And as you say, data centers breed data centers. But they do not require a lot of people. A few dozen people for thousands of servers. KC is not mopping up the 5000 employees from, say, the former Sprint's headquarters with one or two data centers.

You're probably right on Loudon County being wealthy before the data center boom (I'm not local). However I am sure having these data centers there didn't hurt either.

Data centers actually are a huge bonus to the county's taxes. It's a huge (to the point of being a risk) portion of the County's revenue.

I've lived here 20 years and never met anyone who works at a data center.

There’s a place in Loudoun county where I used to get on a trail to bike into the office. There was a beautiful meadow there full of blackbirds and cat tails. I remember one morning sitting there watching the sun come up as the fog sat down on the meadow.

That meadow was torn up and replaced with a random ugly concrete data center full of useless servers probably used mostly for ad tracking. Loudoun is full of the damn things. It’s atrocious.

When you sign into the AWS console they should show a picture of the meadows that were torn up so you could spin up your EMR cluster to analyze “big data”. Maybe then people would realize that the cloud is just someone else’s server sitting in what used to be an actual cloud.

Loudoun County had the highest median income in the country long before it became data center central. A combination of old money in the rural part of the county, high income professionals in the eastern part (traditionally driven by the economy surrounding the federal government but more diverse these days) and a relatively small low income population.

While the county gives tax breaks to the data centers themselves to encourage their development they are greatly out weighed by the property tax revenue generated by the data centers. In 2021 Loudoun County brought in $424 million in property taxes on the equipment in data centers. The county considers the lack of associated employment another feature of the data centers because the number of county residents needing services doesn't significantly increase offsetting the property tax revenue. When your FY22 school system operating budget is $1.493 billion you don't want a lot of people with kids moving in.

People have a tendency to confuse this kind of business decision as something philanthropic, as if the great people of Kansas need this more than they will tolerate it.

Non-story.

Missouri

My apologies.

Argument still stands.

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