It must be due to the groundswell of grass roots support from the local communities where they’re trying to build them. I hear simply everyone wants one in their neighborhood, because it was just too peaceful, quiet and power was so cheap, the electric was literally leaking out of the outlets and staining the rugs.
The USA has great data infrastructure and comparitively cheap power compared to anywhere else that has a vaguely credible grid.
Staff barely matters, the handful of folks they need is a rounding error in the scheme of things.
Real estate in rural America is pretty cheap too. Since they don’t care about proximity to anything day to day, they just need to make sure there’s credible access to power, data, and water.
Meanwhile, they have a government that varies through different degrees of support and pretty much never wavering toward the side of making life difficult so long as they stay at home, but will make things more complicated.
If they did build somewhere that was cheaper, it would be unreliable for their customer base due to network connectivity, and they’d probably have a problem keeping their datacenter suitably powered, and some the US would get pissy about exporting that much compute.
I don’t understand why they’re building all this infrastructure in the USA.
Surely this is one of the most expensive places in the world to build, staff, maintain, and power a large AI data centre?
It must be due to the groundswell of grass roots support from the local communities where they’re trying to build them. I hear simply everyone wants one in their neighborhood, because it was just too peaceful, quiet and power was so cheap, the electric was literally leaking out of the outlets and staining the rugs.
The USA has great data infrastructure and comparitively cheap power compared to anywhere else that has a vaguely credible grid.
Staff barely matters, the handful of folks they need is a rounding error in the scheme of things.
Real estate in rural America is pretty cheap too. Since they don’t care about proximity to anything day to day, they just need to make sure there’s credible access to power, data, and water.
Meanwhile, they have a government that varies through different degrees of support and pretty much never wavering toward the side of making life difficult so long as they stay at home, but will make things more complicated.
If they did build somewhere that was cheaper, it would be unreliable for their customer base due to network connectivity, and they’d probably have a problem keeping their datacenter suitably powered, and some the US would get pissy about exporting that much compute.
Because other countries actually have environmental refulations with teeth. Though i do recall a company wanted to build a huge data center in Kenya https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsofts-usd1-billion-kenya-ai-data-center-project-hits-a-major-hurdle-as-the-government-says-it-would-require-switching-off-half-the-country-to-meet-power-needs