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Lots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.

It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.

by jazzyjackson16 hours ago|

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Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.

Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)

by boelboel14 hours ago|

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There's some 200MW capacity (only 80MW is currently used or being built) data center in a mine near a fjord in Norway. The limiting factor for its capacity seems to be the capacity of the electricity net nearby (which you can just hit and the DC is useless). With how NIMBY Norwegians are there's no way it would ever get to a GW or more even if it might be both technically and economically feasible. That's just one project and can't be replicated anywhere else. It's just a massive advantage that above ground datacenters are relatively 'figured out' and similar everywhere.

edit: 61.9340107, 5.5084207 are the coordinates

by walrus0110 hours ago|

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Do you know if that 200MW figure is total power budget for the facility (including electricity used for cooling systems and other facilities-support systems), or up to 200MW of electronics loads generating heat? The latter would be something like 300 cabinets with 5-6kW heat each.

by boelboel10 hours ago|

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Apparently it's for the whole facility, they have a power usage effectiveness of around 1.1 so 175-180MW of electronics.

https://new.abb.com/news/detail/5924/abb-solutions-power-eur...

by misiek0815 hours ago|

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Germans hid plane engine factories underground with old (not so efficient) diesel generators running 24/7. 80 years ago, so the tech was leaner. Also they didn’t have issues with ventilation and even today if you don’t know where - you won’t see anything driving around.

by MiroslavPokorny2 hours ago|

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Those underground factories were staffed by slaves, who worked until they died. Do we really want to copy monsters like the nazis ?

by IshKebab15 hours ago|

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That's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.

There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?

by walrus0115 hours ago|

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Or when the same thing can be accomplished by putting nothing in a mine, but an approach as simple as having geographical diversity by paying for some 'normal' colo in Hillsboro, and more normal colo in northern VA on the other side of the continent, and duplicating your stuff between two facilities. Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.

by jeltz14 hours ago|

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> Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.

Huh? The ones I know of have plenty of connectivity. The real issue is your first, that people prefer to just put their stuff in two countries over paying premium for having their servers under ground.

by walrus0114 hours ago|

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Your definition of connectivity may not be the same as mine, I'm referring to the number of facilities based carriers and those who ride on top of them you can get at major sites in Hillsboro. Facilities with peeringdb pages that have tons of on net carriers. Is there even an underground bunker colo that's big enough to rate its own peeringdb facility page?