alt Hacker Newswhat I want to know is why the fuck dont they put these data monstrocities in any number of thousands of empty giant office towers littering city centers everywhere, catch all the heat and sell it to the few buildings with actual tenants, and as soon as the much less flamable sodium batteries come on at scale stack the rest of the empty buildings with those,and then run the whole mess from cheap solar
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>why the fuck dont they put these data monstrocities in any number of thousands of empty giant office towers littering city centers everywhere
Big problem is providing enough electricity to an office tower.
A local company built a test T3 datacenter in an office building. Heaps of floorspace. But they cant get enough juice in, they started selling racks with less and less guaranteed supply. IIRC the site is basically forever capped at 2.5MW.
Whats worse is that the inner city location makes it an absolute favorite with telcos, but the telcos cant put their towering monstrous electricity sucking routers in for fear of browning the site (We tried, we were politely asked to leave).
I was walking past the construction of a new site just yesterday and they had the electrical switchboards on the pavement being prepped for being craned in through the open roof. Theres no way you would be able to easily retrofit for that sort of electrical supply.
It's because you have a bunch of different unrelated "theys" in your one "they". There's no one person who can make a decision like that, and the risk and time inherent in trying to negotiate between all those parties is far, far worse than building new.