Ancestors

Toot

Written by Ellie, Limited Edition on 2025-01-31 at 13:25

Recently, a company announced a new large data center in town, and SO MANY PEOPLE are just raring for this to go, from local politicians, to average reddit commenters. Let's get this company a TIF district!

1. This company's model seems to be to build a data center in a cheap place with real estate investment funds, and then try to market it to Google/MS/Oracle etc. And they haven't done this yet. Every project on their site is "in planning." It feels like a grift

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Descendants

Written by Ellie, Limited Edition on 2025-01-31 at 13:26

2. Data center jobs are not abundant, or even particularly great! This place will have maybe 100 permanent employees. Millions of tax dollars to put a 0.3% dent in the number of unemployed in town. These jobs might pay a living wage, but not a generous one, and it's still physical labor shift work, mostly.

Setting aside my disdain for "the hyperscalers" and our current AI boom, seeing people go nuts for this drives me wild!

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Written by maren error on 2025-01-31 at 13:44

@tldrellie huge agree. AFAIK there are only two DCs where I live -- it's not well enough located in the network topology to be practical for more than that.

as a result, it seems like our DCs dont have any faang presence. such a situation to me seems entirely different than what's happening across most of the country, which is five companies building a few hundred DCs that need almost zero personnel to do *the most energy hungry thing imaginable" to make "tools" that are largely not welcomed by users

its boggling. I would love to see a DC that was like a library of racks run by a coop, with a high degree of participation from DC customers and very few non-local users present

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Written by Ellie, Limited Edition on 2025-01-31 at 14:02

@stillgreenmoss Yeah, like, not even getting into the whole 'we don't need this' question, or the environmental question, it's still not a great deal!

Running a datacenter as a coop (member- or worker-owned!) sounds great. I remember a time long long ago when local ISPs ran small DCs for their customers. The capital and cost would probably be a whole thing today, unfortunately.

Like, is it even possible to run a sustainable provider smaller than, like, Linode?

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Written by maren error on 2025-01-31 at 14:28

@tldrellie it's an extremely good question, the answer is definitely "yes" because there are some small DCs still doing it, i regularly think about cyberwurx in atlanta, which is afaik just that one DC and not a property of an international DC conglomerate

but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's possible to do it from the ground up today. i think a lot of the existing "local" DCs (ones that aren't run by huge companies) are cruising on infra and real estate that they got back in the era of local ISPs

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Written by Ellie, Limited Edition on 2025-01-31 at 14:43

@stillgreenmoss Yeah. If you had enough people willing to work for not-as-much-as-they-could-be, you could probably put together something really workable from hyperscalers' surplus equipment, but even then...

Then there's building something like that to be resistant to takeover, too. A friend worked for a series of local-ish DCs (2-5 locations) in the early 2010s, and now they're ALL owned by the same company.

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