It griefs me to see how much the area by my office has changed. My office is in a data center in a complex of four buildings, nearby is what was once the Verizon HQ which has a few large building, and Amazon has data centers in the area. As of this time last year, there were 6.5 million square feet, about 107 acres, of data center floor space in my area, which is Ashburn, VA, one of the wealthiest areas of the country w/ very high property values. The fact that there are so many data centers here already makes it cheaper to build more data centers in the area. With the property values as they are, the fact that companies can afford to host data centers here means they must be making a good profit though one of the reasons they do build here is because we have some of the cheapest electricity in the country. Why that would be I don’t know.
As Ed can attest to, there was a fair amount of undeveloped land in the area….not virgin forest by any stretch of the imagination but there were maybe 500 acres of unused land. As I watch day by day and month by month, construction (or destruction) vehicles, rip up the trees and bushes to clear the land to build more data centers. It was particularly unsettling to watch, as I sat at a stop light near my office, the destruction of some very lovely flowering trees. More than likely, that section of land will be cleared by the end of this coming week.
I don’t understand why we need all these data centers. What is all this data for? Where is it coming from…besides Facebook? What good is all this data? Can it really make life better for humanity? I doubt it. And what about the damage to the environment. We’ll see more erosion, convert less carbon dioxide to oxygen, diminish habitat for God’s creatures, and certainly not improve the views. It takes power to run all these computers in the data centers. Then it takes power to cool down the computers in the data centers. As of last year, there was 676 megawatts of commissioned power for data center use in Ashburn.
I don’t know what that means really or how it translates into say… powering homes. I am still trying to figure that one out. I do know that it seems like a waste of resources. As regards that data, I am not keeping my personally created files out there in someone’s data center so whatever all this is for, it isn’t benefiting me. Given that, is it really benefiting that many of us that is worth the expense and resources. I would venture to say no.