Why do cloud providers keep building datacenters in Phoenix?
theregister.com
theregister.com
> Of course, all the property, tax incentives, and power you ever want won't do cloud providers much good if it's in the middle of nowhere. Latency is still a factor and cloud providers like to spread their datacenters out to serve broad geographic regions. In the case of the Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population.
I'm kind of put off by the title - which sounds as if they should not build in hot areas. It should be "Here's why cloud providers keep building datacenters in the America's hottest city"
Phoenix datacenters are largely a SoCal play, the cost of investing in SoCal versus on the other side of the border with tax incentives a bit more business friendly environment and near zero land costs (compared to Coastal California metro).
When it comes to water management, the desert towns like Las Vegas, Phoenix do a far better job than coastal cities.
note: 80% of American population lives East of 98th parallel, that is roughly East of I-35 and majority of the remaining 20% is along pacific coast.
Right. As measured from the center of the Texas triangle, Phoenix is 915 miles away. Chicago is 910, and Jacksonville, FL on the Atlantic ocean is 900.
The main obstacle are environmentalists. Unfortunately desalination (like Nuclear Energy) is to environmentalists like garlic is to a vampire.
It is why if you want to defrost something quickly, leave it in water rather than in the open air.
Hell my high school in Illinois had one. If you stood in the wrong spot some days you’d get spritzed because it wasn’t quite evaporating everything.
Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_da...
You could of course argue it is still too high, but it is also within the current status quo.
A PE firm is trying to buy it up, but the bonneville administration isn't playing ball and giving them the same rates, so it'll likely sit empty.
Rio Tinto have a poor record and leave toxic waste in various places. It seems possible that the taxpayer will be tidying up their mess.
The subsidies are staggering:
> The total cost of $2.7 billion comes to $274,338 per job per year during 35 years for the 740 jobs in the new plant. If we use the figure of 10.0 cents/kWh, which is the expected cost of new projects under study, the cost per job per year rises to $370,864
And these are 2007 number!!! And no, the smelters aren't paying their employees FAANG wages.
> It is far more profitable to export electricity directly through interconnections than indirectly through aluminum ingots.
I've been caught out by this on multiple occasions.
If it offers up "dallas" for "dal", but the user keeps typing, then it's reasonable to assume "dallas" wasn't what they were looking for, or they'd have picked it after "dal".
Not sure about the hard to track down issue. If you have a Mac and the App Store, they’re there for the downloading. Trying to download to run in a VM on windows or Linux violating license agreement then it is not mine nor Apple’s issue
Whatever the need, it’s of no consequence to Apple that it was a struggle. Having it download as an app is irritating too as it adds steps with the conversion.
https://nektony.com/how-to/uninstall-default-apple-apps-on-m...
Everything is a compromise, by the way.
The Trinity River at Dallas, TX is currently running at 400 cfs, LOL.
JFC. Meanwhile, Hetzner charges 26 ct/kWh in Finland and 53 ct/kWh in Germany [1]. At these prices (and yes, I'm aware these also include the cooling costs) it's completely inexplicable to me how Germany can ever get actually competitive with US services.
Speed of light and data governance laws.
My guess is it's because the US competitors are run by incompetent people that see no need to improve anything because they have non-competitive lock-in.
If anything, European operators have been utterly incompetent in that regard. And not for lack of trying. The only European players left are scaleway and ovh.
On the other hand, you can find tons of cheap operators in the US, they just don't get a similar rep to hetzner here on HN. Hetzner also found a very good niche with their second hand server that you can bid on, for sure. And to be clear, it provides a great service for the price.
What was more shocking to me in that article was that google used 25% of Dallas's water supply.
Between power use and water use, while I appreciate teaching people to be mindful and responsible, I feel like caring slightly less about where I set my thermometer or if I have a long shower when our country's resources are being depleted by big tech and alfalfa shipments to China and almond harvests in California.
As someone else pointed out, it is not Dallas, it is The Dalles. Totally different and vastly smaller town.
I think the only people who -really- care about it are non-US people. Here in the US we know how to do conversions as necessary, and we don't bitch about it.
My parents were taught it in the 40s/50s but not longer use is either
At work I tend to write dates yyyy/mm/dd so it’s clear to my US coworkers what the actually date is
How? And can you provide any examples?
EU is actually doing the opposite because they don't want to be cut off from the US internet companies. For instance, now allowing EU citizens data to be transferred to and stored in the US.
Oh, wait … you’re telling me they just phased that out? :(
But yeah, as it turns out energy prices matter; it’s not just corporate overlords of the fuel companies spreading astroturf when people point out the still-high costs of using renewables. It matters to homes and cars and industry too, and when energy costs more, the nation will have less.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source (but also take a look at https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12... from the IEA/NEA)
The non-intermittents get to name their price. Except for nuclear, of course. EDF were forced to sell at 45 Euros / MWh when the market rate was over 600 last summer, because the private sector is more efficient, so can't be allowed to compete with reactors whose capital cost was paid 40 years ago by a government.
The whole European energy system is a fucking mess, trying to ignore this obvious fact that grids cannot be allowed to fail. Now, go to an manufacturing conference in Europe and the atmosphere is a fucking funeral. Try selling to customers when your plant produces half of what a US or China plant does, at irregular intervals, because it's at the mercy of metereologists. Go on. Try it.
They’re all over the state. Probably can’t walk far without tripping over one!
[0]: https://www.nola.com/news/environment/new-federal-office-wil...
Also, all of this due to pressure from the Greens party, which must be respected for the ruling coalition to operate. I will never understand why Greens think that nuclear reactor problems are just as bad as global warming. Tried talking to some voters, got nothing back except "humans are bad". I guess we're far, far away from a solution if the political parties built around global warming do not understand the problem.
I have three Asus ESC8000 G3 with 8*3080 GPUs each. I have been hosting in the basement but looking at colocation or renting a space. Colocation pricing doesn't seem to favor power-hungry GPU servers though.
I have a source for cheap Asus ESC8000 G3 and cheap 3080 turbo cards, in case anyone needs to set up machines for ML inference, mail me.
On the one hand, the bill is always the same amount, regardless of power consumption. On the other hand, you gotta make sure you use your power budget or you're wasting money.
But I really don't know what the article is implying. We should built zero DCs anywhere hot? Or DCs use lots of resources, like water and power which are in short supply in deserts?
> Costa Rica has a notable geographic advantage in that its concentration per capita of rivers, dams and volcanoes allow for high levels of renewable energy production. This abundance of natural resources and favourable rainfall levels are beneficial for great amounts of hydropower generation.
Long story short: lot's of rainfall and lots of mountains means lots of water flowing downhill.
>A state bill signed into law in early 2021, extended tax breaks on the use, installation, assembly, repair or maintenance of datacenter equipment, for most Arizona datacenter >However, cheap land and favorable tax incentives aren't the only thing cloud providers are looking for.
>Access to power is another important factor. >Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State
>Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population. >However, proximity won't do much good if you don't have adequate connectivity to support them.
It is straight forward to design air-cooled refrigeration systems... even for operation in very hot/desert environments. With this in mind, I think pricing water to make it more cost effective to use water cooling towers, rather than entirely air cooled systems, is very poor policy. The amount of water used to provide cooling for Las Vegas, for instance, is absolutely ridiculous.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/chandler/2021/11/...
It's one of those things that once you hear it, you can't un-hear it.
What about other cloud providers, ISPs, exchanges, peering endpoints, etc? There needs to be good fiber routes to other cities or data centers in the region.
You can't just pick a random city and hope AT&T, Verizon, NTT or whoever would turn up. You can surely pay for it but then that might cost more than the power and other concerns. If there's not enough bandwidth you wouldn't even survive a DDoS attack.
Bitcoin mining requires very little bandwidth. People are successfully large scale mining on starlink connections.
(And with a data center, the majority of the heat is coming from inside the facility, not the environment outside.)
what kind of writing is that? It’s unreadable, in addition to mixing kW and kWh
"With more than a hundred 100F (37.7C in non-Freedom units)"
It's tricky in the sense that anyone could get away with saying, "Although it isn't x, still, nonetheless, it is y," which means the same thing as, "Although it isn't x, it is yet y;" and, in some contexts, 'yet' and 'but' are allowed to be treated as interchangeable synonyms.
They probably just didn't have enough time or energy to finish the thought with enough attention, and punctuation has such usage conventions in order to let it aid rather than to confuse comprehension and attention. Commas are deceptively easy to get into without overhead, but not to get out of without it. We could simply abuse the commas and still choose either one of the following thoughts, but the Register ended up splitting the difference:
At $0.078 a kilowatt, Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State['s], which is closer to $0.04 a kilowatt, but it's still competitive, Howard said.
And, Howard said, while Phoenix's power, at $0.078 a kilowatt, isn't as cheap as Washington State['s], which is closer to $0.04 a kilowatt, it's still competitive.
Journalists are journalists for a reason. (They aren't that much into STEM, if you know what I'm saying)
I've also thought that if one could figure out some of the power electronics a wrecked Prius engine just ticking over at idle would probably provide most of your off-peak power and charge batteries and then during peak times it could just ramp up a bit. I've never heard of a natural gas conversion though so it would be a long road I suspect.
Furthermore, our electric utility has some of the worst reliability in the country. Riddle me that. Some of the most Detroit shit I have ever heard.