Fights, floods, and fortunes when cloud giants roll into town It's easy to think of zones and regions for cloud services in the abstract, as just another spot on the map to spin up virtual machines and services. But every new region means a major construction project and a new flow for communities. Once the facility is up and running, it also means noisy power-sucking systems that absorb …
Why on all earth do we[0] allow these cross-cloud single points of failure to happen? It's not hard to imagine a disaster (see icon) or even "just" a hurricane or flood that would take out a lot of civilisation's compute and everything that relies on it.
[0] Trying to work out who's responsible here is quite an effort. Maybe the UN should compel governments to ensure large spaces between the companies' bitbarns.
Rwanda are happy to take money for morally bankrupt projects, and if UK Home Secretary Priti Patel gets her way there will soon be some staff very keen for employment too. Funding available too.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-and-economic-development-partnership-with-rwanda/migration-and-economic-development-partnership-with-rwanda-equality-impact-assessment-accessible
Seems a win-win.
The reason they're building there is proximity to Washington, D.C. If you as a datacenter customer are stupid enough to put your primary and backup operations into data centers that are in the same local floodplain, served by the same local power substation, and only accessible via a single highway, well...I have no sympathy for you.
If you're just trying to get a piece of the "nation's capitol" capital, then that's where you want your operations located.
The locations are chosen by culture more than anything else. You need staff with technical education and you need a town with a reasonably cosmopolitan attitude.
Ok, I'll just say it. Some parts of America are terrifying stupid and hateful. Even the police will offer advice like, "I didn't see it - maybe you had it comin," "Boys will be boys," "Nobody died," or "Things were fine until you showed up." You tech team isn't moving into the middle of nowhere just because you promise jobs.
I love the "it'll bring so many jobs" for datacenter work.
You bring in a ton of construction from out of town, they work for the year it takes, and then gone.
A datacenter employees typically about 100 employees on an ongoing basis.
I know of grocery stores that employee more people, let alone a target or walmart of that ilk.
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