Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Why Yahoo and Google Will Never Build a Data Center In California (GOOG; YHOO; INTC)

Electricity.
Also one of the reasons Intel said they will never build another manufacturing facility in Cali.
Although all three companies are headquartered in the state they can't afford to expand.
Seven years ago this week we were posting "The Cold, Green Facts":
Data centers draw a lot of power. That newsy tidbit was one of the conclusions of the Environmental Protection Agency's data center report to Congress, released Aug. 2. While not surprising, the EPA's gross numbers are nonetheless staggering. Data centers used 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, or 1.5% of all power consumed in the United States....
In 2010's "Adios California: Adobe, EA Games and Ebay will do Their Expanding in Utah (ADBE; EBAY; ERTS)" it was:
Joining a long list of others.
Intel has publicly stated they won't build another plant in California, über-green Google can't handle the electricity prices and heads for Oregon and Lenoir NC, just as Sunnyvale headquartered Yahoo went to Washington state.
And on and on....
We've been doing this a while. So has Izabella. Here's the latest:
From FT Alphaville:
The dark side of data centres
Most technology users remain blissfully unaware of the internet’s carbon footprint because most “users” never have to come up close and personal with a data centre.

Yet, for all the energy efficiency that technology brings us, data centres remain the technology world’s dark little energy guzzling secret.

Data centres, it could be said, represent the unglamorous side of the technology business. They’re the plumbing that holds the whole thing together. They’re the secret sauce that gives one player an advantage over another. As a consequence, there’s zero advantage — either from a security or cosmetic point of view — of bringing attention to where your data centre is located, how it is run or how much energy it consumes.

The location of Visa’s data centres, for example, is strictly guarded. Google, meanwhile, releases only sparse information about how much energy their centres consume.

But according to a new report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch the plumbing that holds the world’s information and technology communication systems together already consumes up to 10 per cent of the world’s electricity.
As they note:
Growing energy consumption and prices mean that energy costs are leading to business and capacity constraints, particularly for energy-hungry data centres which form the global backbone of the Internet. The combination of rigid, hierarchical structures in networking and storage domains in data centres and the fact that data centres are scaling up to massive sizes (10x growth) means there is an increasing need to lower power costs.
It’s a power gobbling need, they believe, that’s only going to get worse as the internet of things and Big Data up the amount of information that needs to be processed in the next few years. The internet of things alone, they suggest, will grow three times faster than traditional ICT, and by 2020 will equal nearly all other ICT spend.
Here’s a projection from the report....MUCH MORE
Knowing this stuff can make you money.