alt Hacker NewsThat's the land allocation rather than the building-size / data-centre size.
The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).
As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…
244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.
Replies
ninalanyon • yesterday at 10:00 PM
How much parking does a data centre need, and why is it not placed underneath the building, underground? Why do cars have to take up so much land?
➕ show 1 reply
dogcomplex • yesterday at 9:20 PM
It also buffers for all the surrounding properties which would otherwise complain about noise.
Utah’s 40,000 acre datacenter proves it’s not absolutely at the upper end.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...
Most hyperscalers now prefer to build larger sites as “campuses” which may consist of many buildings each consuming 40-100MW, and then yes each building needs most of what you mentioned, so it adds up.
A few sites are now also contemplating BTM or ‘behind the meter’ power generation which takes additional space.
Then some sites like Microsoft’s Fairwater design are optimized for a very large number of Accelerator cabinets — think GPU, TPU, etc. Those cabinets are each consuming 140kW today and with a path to 700-1000kW cabinets soon, so that’s one super dense building instead of a campus of less dense buildings filled with Compute.