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cyberaxyesterday at 6:42 PM2 repliesview on HN

The density of modern racks makes me wonder why they would want so much space. There's just no way to power all of that.

Storage? Even that is now ultra-compact.


Replies

nixgeektoday at 12:29 AM

Amazon is probably deploying in the range of 250,000 racks per year into AWS. That’s millions of square feet before you get into all the infrastructure around them so they’re powered, cooled and operated the way they need.

Figure on ~10 million square feet of conditioned DC space per year, approximately 5-10GW of additional power consumption to power those 250k cabinets (depending on the exact mixture of what’s in the racks — Compute, Storage, Network, Accelerators), and that’s just for one hyperscaler.

There are at least 5-7 companies in the hyperscaler weight class although likely none individually meaningfully larger than AWS, they’re the 800lb bear and everyone else is in the 500-750lb range.

It’s a lot. Datacenters also take long enough to build that a hyperscaler is pouring concrete today for shells they expect to serve real workloads in 2029 - 2031. What you’re seeing come online today in response to customer demand really started being built in 2021 - 2023.

gottorfyesterday at 8:54 PM

They're called hyperscalers for a reason.