Why colos are city slickers and hyperscalers are country bumpkins

Datacenter building decisions tend to fall into two camps with colocation providers plumping for urban areas while hyperscalers seek sites where electricity, land, and construction costs come cheaper. A study by the William Marsh Rice University in Texas, commonly referred to as Rice University, found that colocation …

[I am David Jones]

Is this a fair analogy? High-street stores tend to be found in towns and out-of-town malls tend to be found out of town.

[Richard 12]

It's more than that

Shops need their customers to physically visit, but large warehouses don't. They only need transportation - nearby major roads/interstate/motorway.

[Doctor Syntax]

I suppose the simpler way of finding out why things are placed where they are would simply be to ask those building them. It's not like ecology where chance determines whether a seed has fallen where it can grow or not and you need to discover the distribution patterns and examine things carefully to find out why. Nor is it some past civilisation where you have to examine them archaeologically and, again, look at the environment and work out why they decided to settle where they did, or why they flourished and then died out.

These are conscious decisions by people who are here and now and can actually speak if you ask them.

[Richard 12]

A lot of the time they don't actually know.

People tend to be very poor at attributing decisions, there's quite a few studies showing that.