Georgia needs to produce more electric power for data centers | Hacker News Reader

Georgia needs to produce more electric power for data centers

ajc.com

48 pointssciurus52 comments

There's something eerily true about TFA's observation that data centers have a big footprint but really low headcount. I work in the Atlanta area, and it's amazing how long you can work in tech without ever setting foot in a data center or even seeing one from the outside. They are truly highly invisible infrastructure, hidden behind more and more layers of abstraction. I'm all for abstractions that don't leak, but I'm not sure it's a purely good thing to get so disconnected from the hardware layer.

I used to tag along with our sysadmin sometimes, back when I worked in a place that ran its own data centers - a decade ago - and they aren't really enjoyable places (noisy, not built for human inhabitants), but there's something nice about seeing the actual hardware that runs your applications. It kind of keeps things grounded.

Tangential, but you might like this to mutter upon in the shower:

>"Ask HN: At what point do the Cloud's datacenters become national security sites?" [0]

Its an interesting aspect to think about when taking a high level objective look at the importance of Datacenters on all aspects of modern society.

>>"...Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?..."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38975443

People have probably seen more data centers than they think, and just not noticed. They just look like large buildings if you pass by on the highway.

There used to be a lot of telephone buildings in the US. AT&T built them right in the middle of communities in many cases, but they attempted to match local architecture. Most people never realized they were there.

The ones with security fences stand out more obviously.

Yep. I recently found out the non-descript brick building in the slightly shady part of town actually houses tens of millions of dollars in servers.

It was quite the shock to go from the grimey city alley to a perfectly clean, high tech, and highly secure interior.

So many buildings downtown were getting filled up with telecom and data equipment that the Atlanta city council passed a law about a decade ago to keep it from pushing out all other uses. There are lots of historic buildings that are little more than facades wrapped around these places due to how much fiber runs through downtown making it a very attractive place to locate. The city wants more people downtown so they'd prefer more housing, offices, retail, and hotels (human, not telecom). The law seems to have worked or at least contributed to helping to rebalance uses there.

ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) is based in Atlanta. All of the NYSE and other exchanges they own are in Atlanta area. There are 26,932,748 people in the Piedmont Atlantic region Atlanta-Raleigh. Which has been growing like crazy. This is what drove the data center movement, not corporate welfare called state incentives. They would need the power either way.

I’m sure the article is total wrong about the tax incentives like you say, but ICE AND NYSE had their colocation center and servers in New Jersey, not Georgia. They don’t have servers in GA except maybe for the printers in their office.

https://www.ice.com/fixed-income-data-services/access-and-de...

ICE is actually in Chicago.

The physical markets are in New Jersey.

Not sure what they do in Chicago, but only derivatives are traded there; the spot markets for stocks are all in/around New York.

ICE is the name of the derivatives exchange, which is in Chicago. The cash market is called NYSE.

The parent post said ‘ICE AND NYSE’.

Ah, I didn't know that they operate a derivatives exchange there too.

In any case, they are the ones that operate the electronic NYSE exchange in New York, and that market is definitely located in New Jersey, and neither is in Atlanta.

If you follow the link, they show the locations in NJ and Chicago.

Your right they actual moved their backups out of Atlanta back to NJ in 2022. https://www.ice.com/datacenter

What is the Piedmont Atlantic region? There’s no way there’s 26 million people in those cities. The combined population of GA, NC, and SC is less than 27 million people, which includes all of the costal regions and farm areas. Are you including Savannah and Charleston ?

It’s a real thing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmont_Atlantic_megaregion

(This is also the top google result)

The population in 2018 was 27M, probably much higher now.

Includes most of Tennessee as well - Nashville, Knoxville, Memphis and Chattanooga are in this group.

Knoxville and Chattanooga I can see, but not Nashville or Memphis.

The former are close enough that I understand their inclusion. But the latter are not.

It also includes cities in north and north central Alabama (Birmingham and Huntsville) and Nashville and Memphis

Maybe the company has offices and does some development there, but the data centers themselves running the electronic stock exchanges are all located just across the Hudson from Wall Street in New Jersey:

https://www.ice.com/fixed-income-data-services/access-and-de...

A data center is a giant router/switch

General power goes in > Routed power goes out

It's basically 1:1 minus efficiency losses

I live in "The cloud" and the key driver to data center growth is power routing prior to or concurrent with DC development.

This is why Amazon is investing so heavily into lobbying my county supervisors into destroying our aquifer and farmland to run power [1] to their new DCs

The fact that the whole state of Georgia didn't figure this basic math equation out is unsurprising. Hopefully this elementary planning oversight will make their expansion totally fail.

[1]https://protectpwc.org/

What is "routed power"?

If you zoom out, a datacenter converts electricity into >99% heat and <1% blinky lights.

All copper is an electrical signal, but copper has been largely replaced by fiber runs for a long time now.

> The fact that the whole state of Georgia didn't figure this basic math equation out is unsurprising

Quite the backhanded compliment. What do you have against the state of Georgia?

There's a lot of coastal elitism on hn and cheap swipes at states with the "wrong" politics are common.

The reality is Georgia is kicking butt in terms of attracting economic development, especially industrial.

Georgia is literally on the Atlantic Coast. Sherman marched to the sea, remember?

That phrase does not literally mean any US state with a coast.

And for decades has had the world's busiest airport but that doesn't stop snobs for calling it flyover country regardless of the literal meaning of the phrase.

Hear hear. GA is pretty kickass. Primary and Secondary educational system more rigorous than Texas or Ohio. Generous college tuition funding for B and higher students. Natural beauty and resources. Friendly folks. I'm hoping it continues its upwards trajectory!

I'm a different person, but speaking as a GA resident I kind of agree. Very little gets done that doesn't support the status quo. I'll take this an excuse to list a few personal grievances:

* Georgia DOT is notorious for not building infrastructure. Their gameplan consists almost entirely of maintaining & expanding existing highways/arterials. This isn't for lack of funding, mind you -- last year GDOT had a big budget surplus and all they did with it was refund a bunch of vehicle taxes (this happens surprisingly often)

* Related to the above... ask a GA resident how they feel about metal plates. If that person regularly drives, they'll know.

* The City of Atlanta, despite supporting millions of jobs, only has 500,000 residents. It is perpetually operating on a shoestring budget and the state makes a point of avoiding reinvestment into the city (indeed, slashing the city budget is a common campaign promise)

* Despite (more likely because of...) an almost chronic shortage of cash, the City of Atlanta government is rife with misappropriation and self-dealing. There is little will to do anything about it because of how regionally polarized the politics here are

* The City of Atlanta regularly trades places with Miami as the U.S.'s "most unequal major city" by gini coefficient. We used to be securely #1 before South Fulton seceded from the CoA in 2017 (Tragically relevant: South Fulton is now America's blackest city)

* Related to the above... regions regularly threaten to seceed from the CoA because they are (understandably) frustrated with how poorly things are run. These movements to seceed often succeed. Unfortunately, it's just plain hard to run any city in this state, so both parties usually come out of the deal faring worse than before

With that being said, Georgia isn't a hellscape or anything. Yes... we do punch well above our weightclass in the twin realms of corruption and political infighting, but on the other hand the rent's pretty affordable and we have a really nice forest!

South Fulton was not part of the City of Atlanta, it was an unincorporated part of Fulton County south of the City of Atlanta. It was incorporated as a separate city, but never as part of or separated from Atlanta.

My bad! Thanks for the fact check and keeping me honest. I'm rather glad that the rest of my rant somehow manages to hold up under closer scrutiny!

I'd edit my original post to reflect the correction, but HN puts a timer on these things. If I could go back I'd also try to spell "secede" properly

All is forgiven. As a recent Atlanta transplant, sorry for contributing to traffic and thanks for highlighting local issues you've observed. I'd love to find out where I can stay in the know on these items.

There's hardly any need to apologize for that. GDOT doesn't exactly give most people a practical choice in the matter. Pay no mind to that ridiculous chant of "we full", it is completely untrue for the Atlanta area given our current scale. Projections actually estimate that the population of the city & neighboring population centers will more than double within the next decade.

Growth like that is a rare boon to have in the coming world of negative population projections and (despite my criticisms) city leadership is meeting the challenge with some of the most aggressive housing expansions seen among any major American city in the modern age. Every political voice in the city is unified in this. For all of our faults, we are a city of transplants who hail from across the entire south and beyond -- no matter where you come from you'll be accepted here with open arms.

With all of that being said, some of the better ways to keep in touch with the local issues are probably the AJC and the Atlanta section of the URBANIZE website[1]. Truth be told, I personally get most of my news by participating in local events. I live in the Midtown area, so I keep an eye on our local event calendar[2] and just show up for whatever feels interesting. I'm actually a very big fan of Midtown -- it's one of the few truly viable places in the state to live completely car-free and being here is what continues to drive my passion for making such a lifestyle accessible to as many people as possible.

[1]: https://atlanta.urbanize.city/ [2]: https://www.midtownatl.com/visit/event-calendar

Router/switches don't transform the data, they send it to its destination. Most of the power in data center is used by computers, not the routers, switches, and load balcners. Now if you said that data center acts like one big computer, that would be accurate.

Plus, power doesn't go out, all the power is used by the data center. Mixing data and power leads to confusion.

I agree with the transformation part, and almost said one big transistor or computer but don’t think either are right either. I still think switch is closest.

Computers turn electricity mostly into a display (monitor) (I’m not calling out heat cause every computer does that)

The data piped out of data centers almost purely specifically routed packets - so that looks more like a switch to me

Ah ok, that Georgia (state in the US). From the headline I totally thought it's about the "real" Georgia, and maybe related to Bitcoin mining :)

What makes one more “real” than another?

Maybe because the country took/got the name almost 800-900 years before the state of Georgia existed.

I thought that Georgians called their country Sakartvelo?

The real question is if there are any Georgian Georgists.

yes. there are dozens of us.

"Georgia" is based on the Persian name of the country, and its similarity to the name of the US state is coincidental. For some reason, the Persian name became more popular around the world than the native Sakartvelo. Or the Greek "Iberia", which shares its etymology with "Georgia".

Georgia the country has about half the land of Georgia the state in the US, and Georgia the country has about half the population of Atlanta alone (even less population when compared to the entire US state of Georgia). I think that huge difference in popularity contributes largely to why "Georgia" often refers to the the US state on this site

Didn't Georgia just build the first new nuclear power plant in the US in many decades?

> for data centers

... also vehicles, heat pumps, and whatever else is currently burning hydrocarbons. Everywhere needs more electric power.

The article also mentions water needs, which might end up being the bigger issue as the state has had to implement severe water restrictions during the last couple of droughts. The population has grown quite a bit since the last major drought and not much in the way of new water resources have come online since then.

Maybe it's time to harness the power of humidity.

"Our apologies, unfortunately our website is currently unavailable in most European countries due to GDPR rules.

Welp. Is not tracking people really that difficult?

when you use someone else's software that you haven't written nor audited to see what all it actually does, yes, it's hard.

if you write your own code to do specifically what is necessary and nothing else, no, it's quite easy.

I’m not that familiar with GDPR but I think even using login cookies require some extra work to show ugly banners. That seems like extra work that doesn’t bring any value if audience not in UE

That's not correct, although understanding what's needed is extra work in itself.

Non-essential tracking (using cookies or otherwise) require consent.

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