> what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with?
Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.
Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.
I live in Spain, and my latency to my VPS at Germany, 3,000 kilometers away, is 40 milliseconds. Good enough. A traceroute shows that I have to pass through Madrid (400 km away), with a ping of 5 ms. Do anyone believe that moving datacenters within neighborhoods to shave additional 5 or 10 km is noticeably good for the latency, when 100 km mean extra 1 ms on average? Apparently the Nashville neighbors don't give a shit about -0.1 ms latency.
We have a couple of small datacenters nearby. Luckily they are somewhat isolated from where people live, because the things are noisy at all times, and each year they add more capacity, more refrigeration towers and more noise (all efficiency gained at the CPU/GPU level is used to increase density, not to lower consumption or cooling needs). Nobody would want to live less than 200 meters away from them.
Even for something as simple as a business that needs somewhere to run critical VDI hosts — then yes, they need low latency and somewhere that their techs can physically get to if they need to fix something.
You may also need interconnects to specific physical networks that are only available in certain places. You may need direct connections to partner equipment. This requires physical presence.
Colo space is not something you rent if a VPS is good enough for what you’re doing.
I was responding to why you wouldn’t want one in a different freakin country
The ping between New York and LA is ~70msec. Chatting with a LLM is not latency sensitive.
Considering that the initial build out was only 10MW, it seems unlikely that was the primary usecase.