Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)

What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset.

This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.

Notably, this location is not far from where the Foxconn facility was going to be installed (the "eighth wonder of the world", 10k+ jobs, yada yada). After that debacle, I can imagine local residents are deeply skeptical of new big development projects.

My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance.

How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.

I'd say they should come build them in Canada instead since our energy is cheaper, but anti-industrial development policy and NIMBYism is even more embedded than America, which is probably why no one is bothering.

Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web.

(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)

Probably a wise decision on their part Microsoft already is all in on Copilot AI if it fails, the CEO probably is gone.

For a moment I thought they were referring to the Scottish Highlands, but I guess the name fell in disuse when the Roman Empire fell...

I wonder if USA would have futuristic Datacenter Towns much like coal mining towns - they might have their own lore, vibe and aesthetic about them.

Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help.

This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.

(2025) OP.

Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome.

Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.

The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/da...