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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

It is crazy how you see so many datacenters getting built in places of high land value such as say northern virginia. Why not just build them in west virginia and build twice as many for the same spend? They'd probably even let you burn coal to power them.

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I suspect it's driven by availability of existing grid infrastructure (so they don't have to wait for upgrades) and ease of permitting; the contents of the building and indeed running costs are so high that the land value is much less relevant.

Power, fiber, people.

Power is the biggest one here in Texas, so much so even this laissez-faire state has stopped new permits for data centers. All the inner connect space for grids is used up and the wait for hardware and installs is massive.

So much so we're seeing private grids being setup for data centers.

I'm guessing it's to do with regulation. There's probably some policy document that says a certain org needs to be able to access the physical servers within a certain amount of time, and so they need to be nearby, even though nobody ever does the accessing.

DC would be the kind of place with a lot of government contractors that would have this kind of stipulation, is my guess.

West Virginia also has a lot of coal. I wonder why the current Admin doesn't encourage DCs to be built next to coal. Coal communities don't care much for any regulations, DC development should be perfectly fine. Hyperscalers can brag about 100% coal powered AI.

You would think, but I live in a tiny pop state that is barely thought about, and we have coal, but the hyperscale datacenter project did get pushback. Almost entirely political. No one had an opinion in January. But around summer something flipped. I also work with an existing datacenter here, and there was a similar thing. People were going on about how cool it was, etc, for years, and then suddenly, wham, sentiment changed.

1 datacenter is neat. 1000, maybe not so much.

To add, the numbers are actually this crazy.

https://dcmap.us/states/texas/

>Texas has 623 tracked data center facilities and projects: 349 operational, 101 under construction, 156 planned, 2 paused, and 15 inactive or historical. Reported or announced power totals 96.1 GW, including 85.4 GW tied to planned or under-construction projects.

This is for just one state.

>4,998 facilities and projects nationwide, with 374.7 GW in reported or announced power figures. Of that, 318.6 GW is tied to planned or under-construction projects. Climate-risk and water-stress labels summarize current records with those fields. The directory retains 150 inactive or historical records. States are ordered by current reported or announced power.

Nearby skilled labor, police/fire infrastructure willing to handle it, and ease of demo/tours/sales for clients to install their racks. Also much more stable power.

Low-latency fiber interconnects to other nearby data centers are a core feature of datacenters.

When it all goes bust, at least you'll have some real estate.

There is a lot of electrical supply and demand is high plus incentives from Virginia itself and proximity to DC. It’s already a data center dense market

You'd have to pay folks to move to the middle of nowhere.

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