Slashdot Mirror
Google Confirms $600M South Carolina Data Center
miller60 writes "Google continues its furious data center building program in the Carolinas. Today the company announced a $600 million data center in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Google has already begun construction on a $600 million data center project in Lenoir, North Carolina, and is in the permitting process on another huge project in Richland County, South Carolina. Google's appetite for large tracts of land and cheap power are driving the site location process. Similar huge projects in central Washington are already transforming the tiny town of Quincy, where real estate prices have spiked, with open land fetching as much as 10 times its previous value."
Any of these sites on Google Maps?
Makes you wonder if this (Business)Week's cover story is right, Is Google Too Powerful?
Open land and cheap power, yeah, that's it. The fact that the Carolinas are awfully close to DC, just a coincidence. And it's not like Google's giant facility in Washington State is going to be a stone's throw away from the NSA facility in Yakima, right?
North and South Carolina don't rank so well in terms of electricity cost per state. If you want cheap tracts of land and cheap electricity, you build a data center in Oklahoma or Kansas (yes, Virginia, there is fiber there), not in Washington or the Carolinas...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Does anybody notice that despite the fact that land an power is cheap in Arkansas and Mississippi, they still haven't opened data centers there? :)
I would love for them to open one in the Little Rock area. I wonder if I could convince them somehow...
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Google's appetite for large tracts of land and cheap power are driving the site location process.
Peak oil has already happened and we are beginning down the decline curve. "Cheap power" is becoming more scarce with no entity will escape the harsh reality.
Google has to face the facts. Pushing pixels around a screen is the really irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Will it be one of those weird corporate mega-projects that will get shut down as soon as its built? The corporation had no intention of using the facility, it was just building something for the sake of pleasing investors, getting tax breaks. This is routine business in IT -- Silicon Valley was full of billion-dollar empty campuses when I lived there.
You think it's an accident that they picked the state with the lowest high school graduation rate in the country? Hello, welcome to Walmart.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
It's too bad they need to be locoal to provide bandwidth speeds for most of the consumers. You know they would certainly MUCH rather build the facilities in India or China where they could get by on $10m, instead of $600m.
that everybody is upfront as they claim. They seemed to stress that issue a wee bit too much.
What?
Don't like her? What's wrong with her. She's beautiful, she's rich, she's got huge ... tracts of land.
It sounds like the expansion of the internet is making these search engines use alot more hardware and energy to make all of the content searchable. If only we could automate methods of removing some of the cruft from being included in the search domain then the whole process would be more efficient. I'm mostly referring to the seemingly endless amount of automatically generated content and just plain bizarre content that searches always turn up.
This should be interesting to see. I've friends in the area, and know from them that real estate was already booming, thanks to the urban sprawl of Charleston (pronounced "Challston", for you Yankees out there). Perhaps some of the massive amount of money that is bound to get injected into the local economy will make it to people who could really use it - Berkeley County is not the most wealthy area of our country...
:)
And as a side benefit, I am hoping it will raise the overall 'tech level' of the area, not just in matters of infrastructure, but also in awareness and education.
Possible bonus: Maybe soon I'll get the chance to go look at more Linux boxen than I'd ever imagined possible in one location, too.
Skynet awakeining is getting closer all the time. Few more of these data centers and what wont they be able to take over?
Let's not bicker and argue over who should carbon offset who.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's SO refreshing to see stereotypes painted with such a broad brush.
I for one am excited to see how this works out. I will definitely send them my resume. South Carolina is a fantastic place to work and live, and with more high-tech jobs like this coming to the state and the area, it can only get better.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
keep in in that it's not just how much the power costs, but how much is available in the area... some areas simply don't have an extra 40MW to spare... Here in Quincy they will be pulling around 200MW within 3-5 years...
Can someone explain to me what a data center really is? I just imagine a bunch of servers. How many people does this require to be present? It must be a lot to drive up housing prices but I'm curious what all these people do.
Berkeley County, South Carolina?
They're building a new facility on the opposite coast, just cover up the fact that they never realized they were talking to the government of the wrong Berkeley the whole time?
Guys: just give up. It's not worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid saying, "oops, we goofed".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Roffle.
I live in Richland County, SC and will be selling my house in the next couple of months. So if you want to work for Google and really like to plan ahead I can get you a good deal on a nice 3BR before the prices go up!
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Not to be naive, but what exactly does google need this data centers for? I mean, its not like they're busting at the seams right now, is it? Their services don't seem slow to me.....is there some huge project that they are about to undertake or something? Don't get me wrong, I understand growth and that they would constantly need to expand.....but several half-billion dollar datacenters? What the hell?
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
The summary leaves me scratching my head because the Quincey project is a Microsoft data center, nothing to do with Google. Google is building a data center in The Dalles, Oregon, right on the Columbia River.
m mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001262
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
Quincy is near enough to the Columbia to have cheap hydro power, but I just looked at the map and it's not right on the Columbia like The Dalles. I wonder if Google will use water from the Columbia to help cool their data center; and I wonder what the plan is for the Quincy data center. (Ordinary air conditioning? That part of Washington is cold in the winter but hot in the summer.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Seriously, I have done no research, and I know there is an economy of scale issue, but if you really need lots of power, in one location, surely it must become cost effective at some point to build your own generator.
With no transmission loss, right-of-way issues, delivery infrastructure, etc. there has to be some break-even-point. Wouldn't the entire output of a 200MW plant be cheaper if it was just for a single on-site consumer?
Discuss amongst yourselves, thank you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
As a resident of Berkeley County myself, it's been interesting to hear about all the buzz Google's causing around here. I've been looking at computer programming as my career goal in the future; maybe I'll find a place there.
And maybe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will stop uranium enrichment.
I was so waiting for someone to say that. lol, good show!
Cheap COAL power? Do no evil.
What you are talking about is a co-lo power station. Lots of plants have these. 3M in Austin, TX comes to mind as does TI in Dallas and Sherman, TX. I am quite certain Lockheed in Ft Worth has one as well. Basically -- they are pretty common.
Most the co-los I am familiar with are in the 10-20MW range. I've never seen one larger so I am guessing that is the point where "it makes sense".
Remember, those electrons are 100% recycled, and none of them were harmed in the lighting of those pixels.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
not funny.
Intuit will be there and Yahoo will be nearby
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
SC is bringing in technology and knowledge based industry to dig itself out of the hole it's found itself in
Poster is dead on.
It may shock some people to learn this, but the ill-conceived attempt at secession that began in South Carolina a century and a half ago failed miserably. As a result, South Carolina is still part of the United States. Thus there is no impediment for companies and individuals seeking employment to set up shop there.
As a result, a historically (and currently) poor public education system doesn't necessarily doom a region to economic stagnation. Low taxes, a business-friendly climate, lower cost-of-living, and mild winters do wonders when it comes to recruiting from out of state. The net result is a substantial population migration southward over the past decade or so. You could argue that South Carolina saves a bundle on education by making other states pay the bills.
(/me does not live in South Carolina, and has no connection to the state.)
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
In SC, we have the highest percentage of electricity supplied from nuclear (nucular?) power, so I have heard.
This may help protect us from a rise in oil prices, I hope.
And we are building more reactors at existing sites. Not only are we a dumping ground for nuclear waste, we also have tons of power available, and our beaches are nice too...
Silly speculation, unless Microsoft starts to feel legitimate pain. We're a looooooooooong way from that.
I have a BS in Computer Science and about 10 years of experience. With Google's awesome training program, I am sure I will able to complete all my duties as Data Center Janitor quite successfully.
You can't let just anyone vacuum and clean around all those servers you know!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Quincy is relatively close to both Grand Coulee Dam and I-90. Another good choice would have been Moses Lake, but Microsoft et al. probably got better tax breaks from Quincy because it's smaller and more desparate.
Grand Coulee is the biggest of the dams on the Columbia and so it generates the most power. There isn't much of the Columbia that isn't dammed, but most of those are small dams that don't have deep resevoirs and therefore can't generate as much electricity as Grand Coulee. I think most of the small dams serve primarily agricultural purposes.
I lived in Quincy for about half a year in the early 90s and they had signs on the exits to the town that read "Quincy Opportunities Unlimited." I guess someone finally took them up on it.
They're going to introduce now Gmail with 1TB now that 1giga it's not enough for many of us...
ghostbar page.
That's good. All businesses should be exempt from paying taxes.
Libertas in infinitum
What about their solar investments.... its already in their portfolio
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
So make sure their HDs are below MTBF, they surely rotate and replace harddrives >12months old regardless if they are working (who buys em?) and insert new
ones that are DOUBLE the previous size at a cheaper cost, ie pull out an old raid 120gig * 8 setup and replace with 400 gig * 8 setup.
Surely constantly upgrading storage devices will double their storage capacity per building.
And their hosting servers too would double in power, with cell servers or 8core replacements.
Unless there is a dual use roll for NSA/CIA, and yes thats possible and legal with zero disclosure under secrets acts.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Perhaps these sites don't appear on Google Maps, and it's easy to figure Google wants them to not appear. But guess what? Google has competitors (for now). So the better question is: - Do these sites appear on Yahoo Maps? - Do these sites appear on MSN Live Local? - Do these sites appear on Ask.com maps? While Google wants the info secret, Yahoo/MSN/Ask have a big interest in seeing the information made public.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
The reason Google is choosing South Carolina is the same reason I did after living in the Northeast and Midwest and traveling all over the country and the world for 20+ years. Its simple, South Carolina has great quality of life, great weather, friendly nice people, a great business climate, and is not overcrowded.