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Rural North Carolina Experiences Data Center Boom
1sockchuck writes "Rural counties in western North Carolina have hit the data center trifecta, landing major projects from Google, Apple and Facebook. These marquee tech companies will invest more than $2 billion in small towns like Forest City, Kings Mountain and Maiden, a town of just 3,300 residents. How did western North Carolina become a tech hub? Aggressive tax incentives and an abundant supply of cheap power, a legacy of the textile mills that once thrived in the region, which narrowly missed winning a $499 million Microsoft data center project that ended up in Virginia."
Datacenters + Moonshine = Downtime.
I wonder how hard it'll be to find employees in those areas. I doubt there's a glut of high tech workers looking for jobs in those rural areas and if I were a knowledgeable tech worker I wouldn't really want to move to such a rural area... If you're not into country music and you prefer dance clubs over small bars you would *not* want to move to those areas!
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
I thought Google and the rest were looking for cool zones like Western New York and upper New England. The air conditioning bill in Carolina will be lower than California, but not by much.
I wonder if Western NC and VA residents will still be stuck on dialup, or if they'll finally get an upgrade since they are so close to the data stores?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's unfortunate that such companies will flock to places that offer cheap but dirty power for their facilities. Google, at least, takes a progressive stance towards these things. Hard to maintain a "green" image if your vital infrastructure intensifies the demand for coal-burning. Harder still if you made the conscious choice to participate in this by moving there.
It's always confirmation bias!
As someone who is considering moving to, and settling in western North Carolina (maybe Asheville), my question is how will this affect the availability of broadband connections to local businesses and residents?
These facilities seem to cluster just west of Charlotte, NC. They're definitely going to be bringing in ample amounts of backbone connections in.
How is the bandwidth in the area now, and is there any record of how network access improved when data centers were brought in at other rural locations around the country?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's been strange to see this happen. We live right in the center of all this (near Winston-Salem, apple is 45 minutes south, and google is 20 minutes west) and I have to say, these places are not subtle. These places are HUGE. I think the Elkin/Google installation is like 250 acres, which is silly huge. It makes sense, land out here is cheap but you are still 5 hours from DC which in itself is priceless for corporations (the big ones). Add in tax breaks, an evolving biotech industry (like us... we hope!), and lots of geeks near-local (the triangle with IBM/Glaxo/Redhat/Epic Games/Etc. is 2 hours east) and it seems obvious. The nice part for people who live here is that bandwidth is really really good in order to feed all these guys. REALLY good :)
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
So now that all the eggs are in one basket (except MS, but do they matter any more?), who wants to take bets on how long before DHS drops a brick and decides these data centers ought to be a little more spread out?
Now we know the simple formula for attracting large data centers.
Anyone else going to follow NC's lead?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I live within a few miles of Kings Mountain and Maiden. These are towns where the newspapers' front page stories are about things like a cow escaping from a barn and causing a ruckus as local residents stepped out of their homes to look at it as it walked by (big story from sometime last year). Getting this kind of investment from big tech companies will definitely have a huge impact. It'll be interesting to see how these quiet, unknown towns change in the next five or ten years.
There's a big lawsuit to stop the place(s) in NY from being built...
http://www.buffalonews.com/city/communities/niagara-county/article253768.ece
Which way to the front ?? I wanna get me one of them medals of onurs !!
Eastern North Carolina still sucks.
You can buy/build a house on acres of wooded property. Private, low maintenance, no HOA living.
Horrible residential internet though.
I frequent those areas and its some of the most awesome living. Drawing talent away from RTP doesn't seem infeasible.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Fine, okay, I am glad that Western North Carolina is going to get these data centers. But, are these companies planning on using local talent or importing talent from other areas? I would be happier if these companies planned on hiring local people and providing training opportunities. The reality of this data center boom is that very few of the local residents will realize any benefit beyond low level employment as cleaners or security guards and there will be very few jobs.
>>>There's a big lawsuit to stop the place(s) in NY from being built...
Ahhh yes... environmentalists practicing NIMBY. I guess this is democracy in action but it appears to be shooting self in foot - the building would create jobs and possible future growth if Tech/internet companies (like IBM) relocate near the data centers.
"The heart of the suit involves a ruling last month by the Somerset Town Board, after a preliminary assessment, that the project did not merit a full-blown study under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. 'Environmental, zoning and planning laws aren't meant to be set aside when a pet project comes along,' said the attorney who filed the suit in State Supreme Court on behalf of Mary Ann Rizzo, owner of a 117-acre farm across the street."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
NC State attracts students from across the state, and plenty of them come to Raleigh, get a CS or CE degree, and would be happy to move to a rural area and do IT of some sort. I don't think they'll have any problem finding folks to do the work.
Personally, I'm a little disappointed that cheap (read: lots of coal, little renewable growth) power was a factor for Apple and Google. Facebook's a whore anyway, but Apple and Google purport to be greener than the average company.
Being stationed in North Carolina I learned to love living in a slow pace type of town.
I always said if you wanted to raise a family there it was a good place to do it.
But remember just because they move a big honking Data Center there doesn't mean the pay is going to be comparable to what you are making in your metropolitan city.
Don't expect 60k a year jobs while they could hire someone out of college for 30k and call it a good living wage.
My family still lives in FC, and I will gladly move back there if we can get some more tech in the area. With all of the abandoned textile mills, it would be dirt cheap to raze it and build something new, plus bandwidth is cheap too (and electricity). Plus it is a BEAUTIFUL area, with Lake Lure only 20 minutes west.
I have nothing clever to put here...
This is true; Yahoo just opened a "green" datacenter in Lockport (near Buffalo and Niagara Falls).
http://tonawanda-news.com/local/x1391190391/Yahoo-makes-its-WNY-debut
I haven't the least freaking clue why municipalities and states fall all over themselves to recruit these data centers. In return for a finite good (the available electrical power off the grid), and waiving pretty much all taxes, they get only a tiny handful of jobs. And most of the jobs are NOT high-skill or high-paid, because the jobs in the data center itself revolve almost solely around equipment maintenance. The "high-tech" work is pretty much all done remotely.
I guess it's not bad for a temporary blip in the construction industry, but I'm not sure that's worth the cost. That available grid capacity could almost certainly be put to better use running an office park or a factory.
Western NC is where the mountains are. I live here. These counties are in the PIedmont (maybe, I don't know where "Maiden" is). Regardless, they are most certainly not in Western NC.
Good thing all that big govt infrastructure exists in this red state
I would consider a data center trifecta to be Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
There's a limit to how many computers you can reasonably have if you're not selling off the capacity.
States competing with each other for the fabled 'big payroll'. Ignoring of course that promising to cut (or even eliminate!) taxes on companies if they would just set up shop in their neck of the woods will only last until the next sweetheart deal turns their pretty little corporate greedheads.
For the love of god, did you even read the linked article? I assume yes as you quoted from it, but how is a lawsuit "democracy in action"? I mean seriously, should giant corporations be entirely above the law?
Here in High Point, NC, I have 450 Mbps up and down internet connection at work. I have had decent cable model internet for over 10 years in the Triad area. My local telco (NorthState) has fiber laid throughout city and residents can get up to 20 Mbps.
I used to travel for IT work around the state (I stopped in 2008), and there was always at least one high speed ISP option available. The worst ISPs were the big giant telcos / cable companies.
The town of Morganton (in the mountains) has a very cheap, very fast city-owned cable-modem ISP with helpful techs.
Charlotte Douglas Airport offers free wi-fi (though this isn't rural). Most other airports around the country charge for this.
The worst internet experience in recent memory was San Francisco when I attended the Twitter Chirp conference in April 2010.
I grew up basically in the middle of a cornfield, and I would have gladly welcomed some datacenters in my area. I might have been able to play age of empires online with better than 2k ms of latency average. Damn you cornfield dial-up. Damn you.
How about homeschooling? That helps people escape the "two income trap".
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
"Middle-class parents are stretched thin these days. Between health care costs, child care hassles, looking for a home in a good district, and paying for college, raising a child is becoming increasingly expensive. Little wonder, then, that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts, and 75 percent more likely to have their homes foreclosed. And the danger is growing worse by the year: In 2002 1.6 million people filed for bankruptcy, many of those middle-class parents. a record . As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy. "
In the face of such hardships, many families have sent both parents into the workforce to try to make ends meet. After all, surely if both parents work full-time it shouldn't be hard to ensure financial security, right? Wrong, say authors Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, in their book, The Two Income Trap. Two-income families are almost always worse off than their single-income counterparts were a generation ago, even though they pull in 75 percent more in income. The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did. As the authors write: "Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked against them.""
So, you can live somewhere cheap to live where you can work less and homeschool.
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
We do that ourselves.
On math, see:
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools: In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
"The school that Kenschaft visited happened to be in a very poor district, with mostly African American kids, so at first she figured that the worst teachers must have been assigned to that school, and she theorized that this was why African Americans do even more poorly than white Americans on math tests. But then she went into some schools in wealthy districts, with mostly white kids, and found that the mathematics knowledge of teachers there was equally pathetic. She concluded that nobody could be learning much math in school and, "It appears that the higher scores of the affluent districts are not due to superior teaching but to the supplementary informal 'home schooling' of children."
You and hundreds of millions of others (plus me for a long time) have been scammed about schooling. :-)
But sure, a rural lifestyles has its pros and cons.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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