Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

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I would flip my bitch switch if a datacenter was stood up near me, where I could hear it. I am on 5 acres in rural Michigan surrounded by peace and quiet. I specifically came here for this reason. At the same time, I understand that we need datacenters. And tbh, Michigan is under-served in this space (ex, most of my queries thru the Cloudflare network have to go to Chicago first), and I wish we had more. But not close to residential areas. Not on top of valuable farmland.

My wacky idea was that datacenters should be built on EPA superfund sites. It becomes a win-win. Datacenter gets land that humans cannot occupy, helps/funds partial cleanup, slaps a big ass concrete building down on top of the rest of the mess and kills two birds with one stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).

> Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).

Because it costs an order of magnitude more money to build underground or build a skyscraper than it does it build a precast concrete tilt-up warehouse.

You can build a single story warehouse building with as large of a floor plate as you want, it could be hundreds of square miles if you didn’t need any utilities inside of it. Obviously you do need utilities which limit the overall building size because of things like voltage drop, pump sizing, etc.

Excavating that much earth, building a concrete underground structure, and then covering it, or erecting a steel and concrete tower is much more work than having precast wall sections shipped in from the prefab plant which are then tilted into place with cranes and secured to the concrete slab foundation.

>Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).

It's cheaper this way.

Oh yeah right, underground data centers. What are you going to say next, data centers in space? Be real.

Geothermal heating/cooling exists because deep down in the soil temperatures are fairly constant. And the earth is a fantastic insulator both in temperature and sound. Aside from the cost of digging a giant hole, there really is no reason not to be doing this.

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