> Of course, all the property, tax incentives, and power you ever want won't do cloud providers much good if it's in the middle of nowhere. Latency is still a factor and cloud providers like to spread their datacenters out to serve broad geographic regions. In the case of the Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population.
I'm kind of put off by the title - which sounds as if they should not build in hot areas. It should be "Here's why cloud providers keep building datacenters in the America's hottest city"
Exactly. The article is just saying random things. The title and body have no logical connection to each other, and it reads like it is trying to second guess itself on every point it tries to make.
American South West is Vast expanse. Depends on how you count it too. If DFW, Austin, San Antonio count as American South West for that 20% number, which is arguable, the Phoenix location does not make sense.
Phoenix datacenters are largely a SoCal play, the cost of investing in SoCal versus on the other side of the border with tax incentives a bit more business friendly environment and near zero land costs (compared to Coastal California metro).
When it comes to water management, the desert towns like Las Vegas, Phoenix do a far better job than coastal cities.
note: 80% of American population lives East of 98th parallel, that is roughly East of I-35 and majority of the remaining 20% is along pacific coast.
Do not put Phoenix and Vegas in the same category for water management. Vegas has done a decent job, Phoenix, and the sprawling suburbs around it, have done a terrible job and are in for a very rude awakening.
> If DFW, Austin, San Antonio count as American South West for that 20% number, which is arguable, the Phoenix location does not make sense.
Right. As measured from the center of the Texas triangle, Phoenix is 915 miles away. Chicago is 910, and Jacksonville, FL on the Atlantic ocean is 900.
Sufficiently big AC systems often use water cooling because water is more effective at transferring heat than air, is cheaper than other liquids, and unlike other liquids is not a massive safety hazard if it leaks.
It is why if you want to defrost something quickly, leave it in water rather than in the open air.
Basically, yes. It's about cooling efficiency, cost-effectiveness, practicality and scalability. Water has excellent heat transfer properties, which allows for efficient cooling. As I understand it, solar will have limited capacity and depend on sunlight availability..which obviously fluctuates based on weather conditions, whereas data centers need continuous power supply. Also, cost of installing a large-scale solar power system and maintaining battery storage can be high.
That area of the country is also pretty seismically stable and generally doesn't have other sorts of natural disasters. (Some wildfires but not everywhere.)
The Register misquotes itself by writing that “Google's datacenters in Dallas, Texas consumed more than a quarter of the city's water supply”.
Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’.
This makes the datacenter out to be a massive water user. Which it is, in some sense. It's also worth considering that this volume of water usage -- 274.5 million gallons per annum, or 842 acre-feet -- is about 1/3 that of an average-size (445 acre) farm.
From personal experience, most auto-fill fields will correctly find Dallas for "dal", but will quickly update to Dalles for "dall". Which is weird since "dalla" comes before "dalle" alphabetically which makes me think their "learned" use implies more people looking for Dalles type "dall".
I've been caught out by this on multiple occasions.
Every time I want to launch Photos.app or Photo Booth.app through Spotlight, it keeps flicking between one and the other almost with every key press... then when I think it's done, and am about to press enter, it updates the top result a millisecond before I hit enter.
If it offers up "dallas" for "dal", but the user keeps typing, then it's reasonable to assume "dallas" wasn't what they were looking for, or they'd have picked it after "dal".
And The Dalles, unlike Dallas, has a huge source of water available: the mighty Columbia River, currently flowing 140,000 to 240,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). (Snowmelt causes daily surges.)
The Trinity River at Dallas, TX is currently running at 400 cfs, LOL.
You mean The Dalles that sits on the banks of the humongous Columbia River? That’s the one they are worried about using too much water? The Columbia River pours more water into the Pacific Ocean than any other river in the Western Hemisphere. Are they worried about the Pacific Ocean going dry?
I get that it's common usage (and that's what language basically is), but when I see "80 times smaller" my brain screams "80 times what? Wouldn't `1 times smaller` be zero?" Yes, brain, yes it would.
> And while at $0.078 a kilowatt, Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State, which is closer to $0.04 a kilowatt, but it's still competitive, Howard said.
JFC. Meanwhile, Hetzner charges 26 ct/kWh in Finland and 53 ct/kWh in Germany [1]. At these prices (and yes, I'm aware these also include the cooling costs) it's completely inexplicable to me how Germany can ever get actually competitive with US services.
Oh, wait … you’re telling me they just phased that out? :(
But yeah, as it turns out energy prices matter; it’s not just corporate overlords of the fuel companies spreading astroturf when people point out the still-high costs of using renewables. It matters to homes and cars and industry too, and when energy costs more, the nation will have less.
The myth that nuclear is cheap needs to die[1]. Nuclear is only "cheap" because of government subsidies that mandated its low price per kWh. The actual cost is far above most other options. So if we subsidize anyways, why not subsidize cheaper energy production methods?
The actual cost of renewable energy is barely relevant. What is relevant is that German energy politics has been dominated by Russian oligarchs who want nothing more than to sell Germany as much natural gas as possible. This high cost is not the cost of renewables, because they don't have any - it's the cost of non-renewables meant to be sourced from Russia, and the cost of replacing those with non-Russian sources or Russian laundered sources.
They now buy from the Nuclear Power plants a few km nearby the German Borders. The Prices are that high because of Taxes.
They also probably get cheaper Industry Prices for electricity, but aren't allowed to resell that cheap energy to their customers.
Hetzner competes mainly on price. And completely clears the market on that metric.
My guess is it's because the US competitors are run by incompetent people that see no need to improve anything because they have non-competitive lock-in.
I was planning on renting a 1/3 rack at Hetzner Finland, but power is cheaper in Bulgaria now (I'm in Bulgaria). Currently 19c/kwh for businesses and looking like it's coming down still (used to be closer to 10c I believe). It's also 80% nuclear/renewables, better than Finland, seems.
I have three Asus ESC8000 G3 with 8*3080 GPUs each. I have been hosting in the basement but looking at colocation or renting a space. Colocation pricing doesn't seem to favor power-hungry GPU servers though.
I have a source for cheap Asus ESC8000 G3 and cheap 3080 turbo cards, in case anyone needs to set up machines for ML inference, mail me.
In all the datacenters i've used in the US they don't charge per kwh, they charge per max amperage, so you can get dual 15A 240VAC or dual 45A or whatever you need, and that's baked into the cost. Each rack has a power budget due to cooling concerns, etc.
On the one hand, the bill is always the same amount, regardless of power consumption. On the other hand, you gotta make sure you use your power budget or you're wasting money.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The cost you're paying Hetzner is not just for the power they are buying from the electric company, but the cooling of that same number of watts as well as other building maintenance, networking, etc.
Don't forget we have a huge energy crisis right now due to the cutting of Russian gas. It's not directly affecting electricity production but overall energy pricing is severely affected due to people switching away from gas.
What was more shocking to me in that article was that google used 25% of Dallas's water supply.
Between power use and water use, while I appreciate teaching people to be mindful and responsible, I feel like caring slightly less about where I set my thermometer or if I have a long shower when our country's resources are being depleted by big tech and alfalfa shipments to China and almond harvests in California.
Increased regulatory burden for US companies, increased labour enforcement targeting foreign companies in general, and preferential treatment for DE/EU companies codified in law.
EU is actually doing the opposite because they don't want to be cut off from the US internet companies. For instance, now allowing EU citizens data to be transferred to and stored in the US.
I guess the answer is regions. If they built all their DCs in Washington there wouldn't be any DCs in south middle area of US. And since temperatures are largely based on proximity to the equator, it would mean zero DCs near the equator.
But I really don't know what the article is implying. We should built zero DCs anywhere hot? Or DCs use lots of resources, like water and power which are in short supply in deserts?
If you go near the equator but go up in altitude then it won't be hot. There are places in Costa Rica and Columbia where it is basically 72-degrees every day all year.
I wonder what impact cosmic radiation has at those altitudes. I seem to recall experiments somewhere in Colorado that demonstrated a need for ECC, etc.
True, but wouldn't water be harder to get? From my understanding tops of mountains would have significantly less water reserves than valleys. Although they may have more then deserts...
This article made me dizzy. It keeps going back and forth and destroying every point it tries to make.
>A state bill signed into law in early 2021, extended tax breaks on the use, installation, assembly, repair or maintenance of datacenter equipment, for most Arizona datacenter
>However, cheap land and favorable tax incentives aren't the only thing cloud providers are looking for.
>Access to power is another important factor.
>Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State
>Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population.
>However, proximity won't do much good if you don't have adequate connectivity to support them.
This points to the overall conversation about how fresh water is valued.
If the sliding scale for fresh water prices was more aggressive, this would change the design of cooling systems for industry and large buildings.
It is straight forward to design air-cooled refrigeration systems... even for operation in very hot/desert environments. With this in mind, I think pricing water to make it more cost effective to use water cooling towers, rather than entirely air cooled systems, is very poor policy. The amount of water used to provide cooling for Las Vegas, for instance, is absolutely ridiculous.
Every time these kind of stories come up, I just think of that guy in Chandler, AZ that just hears wump wump wump wump of the air conditioner all year round. I feel for him. Hopefully he moved.
Well, I tried to find the specific story but I can't. However since that article first came out, apparently it highlighted the issue and now articles like this seem to be coming up:
Readit News
> Of course, all the property, tax incentives, and power you ever want won't do cloud providers much good if it's in the middle of nowhere. Latency is still a factor and cloud providers like to spread their datacenters out to serve broad geographic regions. In the case of the Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population.
I'm kind of put off by the title - which sounds as if they should not build in hot areas. It should be "Here's why cloud providers keep building datacenters in the America's hottest city"
Phoenix datacenters are largely a SoCal play, the cost of investing in SoCal versus on the other side of the border with tax incentives a bit more business friendly environment and near zero land costs (compared to Coastal California metro).
When it comes to water management, the desert towns like Las Vegas, Phoenix do a far better job than coastal cities.
note: 80% of American population lives East of 98th parallel, that is roughly East of I-35 and majority of the remaining 20% is along pacific coast.
Right. As measured from the center of the Texas triangle, Phoenix is 915 miles away. Chicago is 910, and Jacksonville, FL on the Atlantic ocean is 900.
It is why if you want to defrost something quickly, leave it in water rather than in the open air.
Hell my high school in Illinois had one. If you stood in the wrong spot some days you’d get spritzed because it wasn’t quite evaporating everything.
Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_da...
I've been caught out by this on multiple occasions.
If it offers up "dallas" for "dal", but the user keeps typing, then it's reasonable to assume "dallas" wasn't what they were looking for, or they'd have picked it after "dal".
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The Trinity River at Dallas, TX is currently running at 400 cfs, LOL.
JFC. Meanwhile, Hetzner charges 26 ct/kWh in Finland and 53 ct/kWh in Germany [1]. At these prices (and yes, I'm aware these also include the cooling costs) it's completely inexplicable to me how Germany can ever get actually competitive with US services.
[1] https://www.hetzner.com/de/colocation/
Oh, wait … you’re telling me they just phased that out? :(
But yeah, as it turns out energy prices matter; it’s not just corporate overlords of the fuel companies spreading astroturf when people point out the still-high costs of using renewables. It matters to homes and cars and industry too, and when energy costs more, the nation will have less.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source (but also take a look at https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12... from the IEA/NEA)
Speed of light and data governance laws.
My guess is it's because the US competitors are run by incompetent people that see no need to improve anything because they have non-competitive lock-in.
I have three Asus ESC8000 G3 with 8*3080 GPUs each. I have been hosting in the basement but looking at colocation or renting a space. Colocation pricing doesn't seem to favor power-hungry GPU servers though.
I have a source for cheap Asus ESC8000 G3 and cheap 3080 turbo cards, in case anyone needs to set up machines for ML inference, mail me.
On the one hand, the bill is always the same amount, regardless of power consumption. On the other hand, you gotta make sure you use your power budget or you're wasting money.
What was more shocking to me in that article was that google used 25% of Dallas's water supply.
Between power use and water use, while I appreciate teaching people to be mindful and responsible, I feel like caring slightly less about where I set my thermometer or if I have a long shower when our country's resources are being depleted by big tech and alfalfa shipments to China and almond harvests in California.
As someone else pointed out, it is not Dallas, it is The Dalles. Totally different and vastly smaller town.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36737353
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How? And can you provide any examples?
EU is actually doing the opposite because they don't want to be cut off from the US internet companies. For instance, now allowing EU citizens data to be transferred to and stored in the US.
But I really don't know what the article is implying. We should built zero DCs anywhere hot? Or DCs use lots of resources, like water and power which are in short supply in deserts?
>A state bill signed into law in early 2021, extended tax breaks on the use, installation, assembly, repair or maintenance of datacenter equipment, for most Arizona datacenter >However, cheap land and favorable tax incentives aren't the only thing cloud providers are looking for.
>Access to power is another important factor. >Phoenix's power isn't as cheap as Washington State
>Phoenix, that's the American Southwest, which is home to just shy of a fifth of the US population. >However, proximity won't do much good if you don't have adequate connectivity to support them.
It is straight forward to design air-cooled refrigeration systems... even for operation in very hot/desert environments. With this in mind, I think pricing water to make it more cost effective to use water cooling towers, rather than entirely air cooled systems, is very poor policy. The amount of water used to provide cooling for Las Vegas, for instance, is absolutely ridiculous.
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https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/chandler/2021/11/...
It's one of those things that once you hear it, you can't un-hear it.