this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
962 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
74067 readers
3285 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Then why the fuck do they keep wanting build them in the middle of the desert then?
Cheap land, dry air is good for evaporative cooling, and many arid areas have a surprising amount of ground water. It ultimately comes down to being the cheapest option, not the smartest or best option.
So how long to the billionaires have that entire city council replaced with people who are in their pocket and will vote for its passing?
In the states? 1-2 years tops.
Trump will have them arrested on terrorism charges in a month...after a totally coincidental delivery of a golden idol to trump, from bezos
edit I said this as a joke, and later found Apple recently gifted Trump a golden idol.
God I miss when satire was silliness, and not psychic future sight.
Externalization of cost, the environment and community bears the cost instead of the corporation. Privatize the profits, externalize the costs.
In addition to the other answers;
America's deserts are tectonically stable and don't experience natural disasters. If you want your data and/or compute running in two regions for redundancy, somewhere in the desert is a good choice for one of your DCs.
Maybe in AZ or other states but CA deserts are not tectonically stable.
I know. Was looking for a term to separate the two areas. Not like the San Andreas fault is stable!
How could I have dialed that in better?
Probably some ecological or geologic zone that would be precise but I don't know.
Two more reasons not yet mentioned:
It is close to a population center (Phoenix) keeping latency low to customers. Getting customers off the public Internet quickly and into your private network fast is best for a lot of reasons.
Cheap and abundant solar power. Data centers are extremely power hungry and power lines are expensive so companies like Amazon almost always secure abundant power rights before building. Google built their first data center in The Dalles Oregon because an aluminum smelter had gone belly up and left a bunch of capacity unclaimed in a local hydroelectric dam.
Because the local and state governments in those deserts keep promising them unlimited water for nearly free
Then local governments need be strung up. Tar and feathered and hung from the largest tree in the state.
Demand, ain't much of it in the desert. Also, easy to manipulate governments.
Fewer hurricanes out there, and other natural disasters as well. I don't know how tuscon is seismically, but otherwise it has a lot of lowere risks from nature, probably