US State of Virginia Has More Datacenter Capacity Than Europe or China (theregister.com) 42
The state of Virginia has over a third of America's hyperscale datacenter capacity, and this amounts to more than the entire capacity of China or the whole of Europe, highlighting just how much infrastructure is concentrated along the so-called Datacenter Alley. The Register reports: These figures come from Synergy Research Group, which said that the US accounts for 53 percent of global hyperscale datacenter capacity, as measured by critical IT load, at the end of the second quarter of 2022. The remainder is relatively evenly split between China, Europe, and the rest of the world. While few would be surprised at the US accounting for the lion's share of datacenter capacity, the fact that so much is concentrated in one state could raise a few eyebrows, especially when it is centered on a small number of counties in Northern Virginia -- typically Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax -- which make up Datacenter Alley.
"Hyperscale operators take a lot of factors into account when deciding where to locate their datacenter infrastructure," said Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale. "This includes availability of suitable real estate, cost and availability of power supply options, proximity to customers, the risk of natural disasters, local incentives and approvals processes, the ease of doing business and internal business dynamics, and this has inevitably led to some hyperscale hot spots." Amazon in particular locates a large amount of its datacenter infrastructure in Northern Virginia, with Microsoft, Facebook, Google, ByteDance, and others also having a major presence, according to Synergy. The big three cloud providers -- Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- have the broadest hyperscale bit barn footprint, with each of these having over 130 datacenters of the 800 or so around the globe. When measured in datacenter capacity, the leading companies are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent, according to Synergy.
"Hyperscale operators take a lot of factors into account when deciding where to locate their datacenter infrastructure," said Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale. "This includes availability of suitable real estate, cost and availability of power supply options, proximity to customers, the risk of natural disasters, local incentives and approvals processes, the ease of doing business and internal business dynamics, and this has inevitably led to some hyperscale hot spots." Amazon in particular locates a large amount of its datacenter infrastructure in Northern Virginia, with Microsoft, Facebook, Google, ByteDance, and others also having a major presence, according to Synergy. The big three cloud providers -- Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- have the broadest hyperscale bit barn footprint, with each of these having over 130 datacenters of the 800 or so around the globe. When measured in datacenter capacity, the leading companies are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent, according to Synergy.
I'm surprised... (Score:2)
Re: I'm surprised... (Score:5, Informative)
When these centers were first being built land along the Dulles Greenway was fairly cheap for the area. Prices have skyrocketed since the Metro went in (almost open). Now you want to be there because everyone else is.
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It's not about the price of land. You build data centers where the network resources are.
Northern Virginia along the Dulles corridor was THE east coast hub for pre-Internet telecommunications. If you made a long distance phone call from anywhere on the east coast, it usually passed through a digital line in Northern Virginia.
When the Internet first started, it was built out of such telecom lines. Since they hubbed in Northern Virginia, two lines which stopped there were more or less the same price as one li
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the [near infinite] power supply they need is in DC, near their customer base of the three letter agencies of the 4th branch
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You'd be right, except that you aren't.
The power supply is a major issue and has been for years. I used to work for a well-known internet company responsible for running two of the global DNS root servers. Their datacenter was 2/3 empty because of power issues. As the power density of servers had increased, the grid hadn't been able to increase supply to keep the datacenter full. Every time more processing or storage capacity was needed in production, we had to remove as much power consumption as we add
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Not sure where you are getting those figures, but I think they are probably a few years old. Virginia has been phasing out coal for a few years, and has been massively increasing renewables (and natural gas) to replace it. Per https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid... [eia.gov], Virginia is currently 45% natural gas, less than 4% coal, and negligible petroleum. 38% is nuclear, 2% is hydroelectric, and 11% is other renewables - a percentage that has been growing rapidly. And a lot of the growth in renewables has been driven
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Data centers bring power lines.
AWS is building a datacenter in Warrenton VA and Dominion Power is obligated to run a high voltage transmission line. They're going to bulldoze whole neighborhoods to run it, including mine. Despite protests, the county Board of Supervisors approved it. Afterwards one of the board resigned because his wife took a principal position with AWS. Coincidence? Lol.
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Re: I'm surprised... (Score:1)
Energy usage (Score:2)
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Well, statewide stats [findenergy.com] are easy enough to find, but the data centers are probably concentrated in the north. What a terrible graph they have there. All those shades of gray, and it needs to either lump the small percentages as "other" or use a log scale.
Thank AOL (Score:5, Interesting)
It was AOL that really made it a destination for data centers. AOL had a competitive advantage on the scale of their operations close to DC with some early hosting stuff and the fiber access started to bring in others.
Re: Thank AOL (Score:2)
Yes, this. AOL built a ton of data centers which drew many other companies like a magnet.
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Verizon really got into Reston via the GTE aquisition. They kept it because of AOL though from what I understood. At the time a bunch of companies were pushing further south towards Richmond due to "capitol corridor risks".
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Just drive past AOL and go out to Redskins/Commander's practice field out in Ashburn and it's datacenter after datacenter after datacenter.
Did I mention there were datacenters in Ashburn?
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Genuity (formerly GTE Internet, formerly BBN Networking) ran AOL's dial-up Points of Presence in addition to being a tier 1 ISP supplying internet capacity to just about any ISP you ever bought from. Since the Ma Bell break up, Telcos weren't able to be sell long-distance and short-distance services in the same market, and until a few key court rulings in 2001 ISPs were considered long-distance telephony. GTEI was a wholly owned subsidiary of GTE. When GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to become Verizon, the
Somehwere roughly an hour-ish by car from Sterling (Score:1)
Somewhere roughly an hour-ish by car from Sterling, VA -- home to a colo a shop I worked at had a cage in -- is a sweeeet disc golf course with 3 18-hole courses.
Up a hill or down a hill, very tight and woody. A technical course fer sure.
Forgot the name, but I"m sure PDGA site will have it.
Worth a visit, if you like to flingus discus
No mention of Dulles Airport (Score:2)
Dulles Airport and having sufficient power sorta matter too.
First EMP (Score:2)
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FEMA/DHS/HHS all have their coop site way outside of DC. Mount Weather, Falling Water, Frederick, just to name a few. Both Mount Weather and Falling Water have some insane installations. Frederick is also very interesting as well. Tucked away down the street on English Muffin Way, close to the place where they make English Muffins.... :-D
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Just to nitpick ... (Score:3, Informative)
US State of Virginia ...
We're a Commonwealth [wikipedia.org] not a state.
Re: Just to nitpick ... (Score:2, Informative)
Nice try. The name of the state is Commonwealth of Virginia.
The U.S. consists of 50 states, not 46 states and four commonwealths.
Your attempt at being pedantic is a failure, and we discourage you from further attempts.
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The only US state that is really different than other states is Louisiana, which has a lot of (French-derived) civil law, as opposed to common law, in its state code.
The other 49 states are plain old states no matter what they call themselves.
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It's a schooner
Such a CF in Manassas... (Score:4, Interesting)
AWS us-east-1 (IAD) (Score:1)
IAD is roughly twice as large as the next largest AWS region in the world (us-west-2, PDX) and as someone who knows, I recommend you use a different zone (us-east-2, CMH is pretty solid), to avoid unique scaling problems. IAD is an exception to the limits in essentially every service that operates there.
But if you need a few hundred i{3,4}.16xl, or whatever, that's probably where you're gonna land. Good luck!
"Take me home, to the place, my data belongs..." (Score:1)
But as every lawyer will tell you... (Score:2)
"It's the Commonwealth of Virginia because Virginia is a commonwealth, not a state." -_-
decentralization (Score:2)
So much for decentralization. Also, power there is not cheap.
Not surprising (Score:2)
Don't put all your eggs in one basket (Score:1)
If there's anything the pandemic should have taught us, it's spread resources and suppliers around so that one problem spot doesn't jam the entire supply chain.
There should be incentives to spread to other states, and even Canada and Mexico. It seems to me colder states would be better anyhow because cooling costs would be lower.
Used to work for AWS as a data center tech (Score:1)
For Amazon, at least? They do have a large number of data centers in the Northern Virginia area, and at this point? More growth there is largely due to the logistics of things. (If you've got someone you hired in that area to do work in their data centers, it's far more efficient if they can physically visit any number of sites as needed. With them spread out over more of the country, it would involve exponentially larger travel expenses for them, or hiring far more people just because of their proximity to
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In 2016 AWS opened Montreal and Columbus OH, so now there are five in North America.
Asia/Pacific: 8
Europe: 6
Middle East: 2
Africa: 1
South America: 1
Traceroutes used to be more interesting. Wikipedia says MAE-West and MAE-East no longer exist as such. They went online about the time the http protocol did, early 1990s, and commercial traceroutes hopped through universities sometimes, as I recall it. "The internet routes around trouble." Afterwards they were still more interesting than now. One major provider h