Amazon's Cloud Data Center To Follow Google To Oregon

1sockchuck writes "All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud. It resides in servers and data centers. That's why Amazon.com is quietly building a large data center complex in Oregon along the Columbia River, not far from Google's secret data lair in The Dalles. Amazon Web Services started as a way to monetize excess data center capacity for its retail operation, but has grown to the point where it requires dedicated infrastructure. Amazon recently said that its S3 cloud storage service is hosting 29 billion objects."

Comments

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, its hydro. Cheap "green" electricity why its becoming prime data center territory.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Snowblindeye]

.On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....

Yes, Hydro. Thats the main reason these companies are moving their data centers to Oregon: The availability of cheap and plentiful hydro power.

Lots of dark fiber that is well connected, as well as tax breaks, also help.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Fat Cow]

mainly hydro, some natural gas - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/oregon.pdf

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dalles is just upstream from bonneville dam. We have heaps of wind power and hydro. Oregon / Washington kicks ass for tech companies wanting to suck up energy.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[QuantumRiff]

Oregon happens to have a very gentle sloping shelf at the ocean. Oregon also doesn't have a large amount of shipping traffic, with their nasty anchors. This makes it ideal to run an underwater fiber across the pacific. There are a ton of fibers going across the Pacific ocean from the state. (it is really strange to see a multi-gigabit fiber landing in a small ocean side town where they have difficulty getting anything but dial-up connections!) Oregon also has huge power lines, running right to the sites near where they are putting the datacenters. There used to be a ton of Aluminum Smelters in the Columbia gorge, that are mostly closed now, because they can't keep prices as low as foreign run smelters can. In fact, the large, hugely power hungry smelters were one of the main reasons all the dams on the Columbia were designed, to produce aluminum that was in such short supply in world war 2.