It was also fun to check out the company-city that is Redmond, not far away.
Seattle's a great city, and it's got great tech presence. I'm optimistic for its recovery.
First: It doesn't get dark until practically midnight, so the fireworks show started at 10:00, but it was still pretty light.
The second: Most families there had at least one parent with a Windows phone or Surface Tablet, back when they only used ARM processors. I had seen maybe one of each in use before that, and suddenly I was surrounded by them.
SLU and Denny Triangle are amazing now. Those are some of the few places with restaurants open into the evenings. Amazon, like them or not, does a great job prioritizing local businesses in the retail spaces in their buildings. They can't all survive, but they've had a good track record.
Despite the graph shown in the article, I have to wonder if this is really a new problem.
now where should data centers be constructed, rather than arable farmland?
The reason being that they had a huge number of old, grandfathered-in clients with old systems from ten or fifteen years ago which were using massive amounts of power for the work they were doing; newer systems could do the same work for a tenth the power or less, but the customers have no reason to upgrade so they don't.
Getting any more power into the building, I was told, would require having BC Hydro replace the transmission lines coming into the building, which would expand out to a modernization of a lot of the transmission lines in the neighbourhood. For obvious reasons it was cheaper for them to just build a new data centre somewhere else, though they wouldn't say where at the time.
When it comes to the hyperscale data centres that are all the rage these days, it's very likely that downtown Seattle doesn't have the power infrastructure to support very many, if any; couple that with the claim from this random website I've never heard of that hyperscale data centres could be up to 10 million square feet and you'd probably have to bulldoze half of downtown Seattle to build the infrastructure required.
Legacy of all kinds seems always to be so expensive to deal with.
Simple, obvious answer to your rhetorical question is: where there's water and power. But city water and city power are not the same as what ag needs / wants / suffers. City water and city power have reliability and purity / quality standards which ag doesn't need (not enough to pay for it).
Do the objectives / needs of datacenters comport with the constraints and drivers which evolved city water / power? How do the constituents who paid for (and probably are still paying for) the buildout feel about the resource _which they own_ being utilized for a purpose which maybe doesn't comport with the _contract_ they thought they were getting?