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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."
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.
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...
My bet it has more to do with states that offer massive tax breaks to businesses for moving in. I know North Carolina is famous for it, especially with the new Dell facility in Greensboro and Lenovo in RTP. The Dell deal was so good the state could have employed everyone hired by Dell for 11 years with the tax breaks and loans.
500MW will cost you about one billion dollars (can you hear the pinky?). 200MW is likely not half the cost, so we are talking several hundred million dollars. Up front. Not including fuel and maintenance costs. There are some customers that have smaller generating capacity on site, but they generally have need for more than power, say for example, chemical refineries that can use the waste heat or steam, pressure for pumping a pipeline, or other uses.
At what point does it make sense to "make your own power"?
Umm... at what point does it ever make sense to build a datacenter that doesn't have the ability to run off its own power? South Carolina can experience some grid-pummeling weather, sometimes. If Google plans on having that facility up 24x7, there will be a small fleet of diesel generators and a small ocean of fuel sitting right there to keep it afloat in a pinch. Especially when what they're really up to isn't growing for more search, but growing to host web-based business apps and other stuff that they'll be telling people they can really depend on.
Now, just because you CAN run off your own power doesn't mean you want to do it for long, since it's very maintenance intensive.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.