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.
replyJust wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
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.
replyedit: 61.9340107, 5.5084207 are the coordinates
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.
replyApparently it's for the whole facility, they have a power usage effectiveness of around 1.1 so 175-180MW of electronics.
replyhttps://new.abb.com/news/detail/5924/abb-solutions-power-eur...
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.
replyThose underground factories were staffed by slaves, who worked until they died. Do we really want to copy monsters like the nazis ?
replyThat's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.
replyThere 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?
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.
reply> Weird underground datacenters aren't exactly known for having a large number of competing on-net carriers.
replyHuh? 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.
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?
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