Google Confirms $600M South Carolina Data Center

miller60 writes "Google continues its furious data center building program in the Carolinas. Today the company announced a $600 million data center in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Google has already begun construction on a $600 million data center project in Lenoir, North Carolina, and is in the permitting process on another huge project in Richland County, South Carolina. Google's appetite for large tracts of land and cheap power are driving the site location process. Similar huge projects in central Washington are already transforming the tiny town of Quincy, where real estate prices have spiked, with open land fetching as much as 10 times its previous value."

Maps

Any of these sites on Google Maps?

Re:Maps

Doesn't look like it. I live about a mile from the site. I just looked on Google Maps and Google Earth and I see where it is but the maps do not show that the ground has been broken yet. Trust me, the construction began months ago. They have already cleared a lot of the woods. That doesn't show up yet. As someone in the IT field living just down the street, we are glad that Google is coming... but we do not kid ourselves either. I told a co-worker the other day that an intellectual company like Google does not locate their data center int the state that is 50th in education for the local talent pool. It may have been underplayed but it was said that they are under no obligation to hire from the local economy. Either way. I personally welcome our new Google overlords here in Goose Creek. My advice? Not matter what the locals say, do not eat the grits. I have lived here since 1977 and those things are disgusting. Stick with oatmeal... ya'll.

Re:Maps

I thought that liking hot grits was central to the Slashdot experience.

It's like they say, Slashdot has changed.

Re:Maps

South Carolina education is a little deceptive. The schools in the Myrtle Beach area are extraordinary, with high teacher pay, excellent resources, and strong student achievement. Cross the county line, and you find one of the most underfunded and outdated school districts in the United States.

If you're looking for smart, capable people in South Carolina (or California, or Idaho, or wherever), you'll find smart, capable people - as long as compensation is strong.

Most of Google's hires may be from out of state, but they will quickly become South Carolinians through property purchase, taxation, and spending their money within the local service economy.

Teaching them to love Lowcountry shrimp boil will take a few weeks; teaching them to say "y'all" as a pronoun will take a few months; teaching them to refer to all soft drinks as "Coke" takes one to two years. But now I'm offtopic.....

.... at a geometric rate....

Makes you wonder if this (Business)Week's cover story is right, Is Google Too Powerful? [businessweek.com]

No matter how cheap...

Does anybody notice that despite the fact that land an power is cheap in Arkansas and Mississippi, they still haven't opened data centers there? :)

I would love for them to open one in the Little Rock area. I wonder if I could convince them somehow...

Waste

Google's appetite for large tracts of land and cheap power are driving the site location process.
 
Peak oil has already happened and we are beginning down the decline curve. "Cheap power" is becoming more scarce with no entity will escape the harsh reality.
 
Google has to face the facts. Pushing pixels around a screen is the really irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

If it lasts

Will it be one of those weird corporate mega-projects that will get shut down as soon as its built? The corporation had no intention of using the facility, it was just building something for the sake of pleasing investors, getting tax breaks. This is routine business in IT -- Silicon Valley was full of billion-dollar empty campuses when I lived there.

Let's hope

that everybody is upfront as they claim. They seemed to stress that issue a wee bit too much.

How about building a data center at Swamp Castle

Don't like her? What's wrong with her. She's beautiful, she's rich, she's got huge ... tracts of land.

Re:How about building a data center at Swamp Castl

Let's not bicker and argue over who should carbon offset who.

So much cruft

It sounds like the expansion of the internet is making these search engines use alot more hardware and energy to make all of the content searchable. If only we could automate methods of removing some of the cruft from being included in the search domain then the whole process would be more efficient. I'm mostly referring to the seemingly endless amount of automatically generated content and just plain bizarre content that searches always turn up.

Goog-y'all!

This should be interesting to see. I've friends in the area, and know from them that real estate was already booming, thanks to the urban sprawl of Charleston (pronounced "Challston", for you Yankees out there). Perhaps some of the massive amount of money that is bound to get injected into the local economy will make it to people who could really use it - Berkeley County is not the most wealthy area of our country...

And as a side benefit, I am hoping it will raise the overall 'tech level' of the area, not just in matters of infrastructure, but also in awareness and education.

Possible bonus: Maybe soon I'll get the chance to go look at more Linux boxen than I'd ever imagined possible in one location, too. :)

Skynet.

Skynet awakeining is getting closer all the time. Few more of these data centers and what wont they be able to take over?

We're not all hillbillies here...

It's SO refreshing to see stereotypes painted with such a broad brush.

I for one am excited to see how this works out. I will definitely send them my resume. South Carolina is a fantastic place to work and live, and with more high-tech jobs like this coming to the state and the area, it can only get better.

Not just the cost of the power

keep in in that it's not just how much the power costs, but how much is available in the area... some areas simply don't have an extra 40MW to spare... Here in Quincy they will be pulling around 200MW within 3-5 years...

How much does "power" cost?

At what point does it make sense to "make your own power"?

Seriously, I have done no research, and I know there is an economy of scale issue, but if you really need lots of power, in one location, surely it must become cost effective at some point to build your own generator.

With no transmission loss, right-of-way issues, delivery infrastructure, etc. there has to be some break-even-point. Wouldn't the entire output of a 200MW plant be cheaper if it was just for a single on-site consumer?

Discuss amongst yourselves, thank you.

Re:How much does "power" cost?

At what point does it make sense to "make your own power"?

Umm... at what point does it ever make sense to build a datacenter that doesn't have the ability to run off its own power? South Carolina can experience some grid-pummeling weather, sometimes. If Google plans on having that facility up 24x7, there will be a small fleet of diesel generators and a small ocean of fuel sitting right there to keep it afloat in a pinch. Especially when what they're really up to isn't growing for more search, but growing to host web-based business apps and other stuff that they'll be telling people they can really depend on.

Now, just because you CAN run off your own power doesn't mean you want to do it for long, since it's very maintenance intensive.

How many people does this require in the area?

Can someone explain to me what a data center really is? I just imagine a bunch of servers. How many people does this require to be present? It must be a lot to drive up housing prices but I'm curious what all these people do.

Dude, let it go

Berkeley County, South Carolina?

They're building a new facility on the opposite coast, just cover up the fact that they never realized they were talking to the government of the wrong Berkeley the whole time?

Guys: just give up. It's not worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid saying, "oops, we goofed".

Perfect timing!

I live in Richland County, SC and will be selling my house in the next couple of months. So if you want to work for Google and really like to plan ahead I can get you a good deal on a nice 3BR before the prices go up!

Resistance is futile

Not to be naive, but what exactly does google need this data centers for? I mean, its not like they're busting at the seams right now, is it? Their services don't seem slow to me.....is there some huge project that they are about to undertake or something? Don't get me wrong, I understand growth and that they would constantly need to expand.....but several half-billion dollar datacenters? What the hell?

Re:Resistance is futile

I'm pretty sure I remember reading an article on Slashdot a while back that Google was beginning to run out of space with their current infrastructure (though I think that was several data center announcements ago). Remember that Google pretty much makes their own copy of the internet, as well as having a crap load of data about every single site out there, has to store all the gmail email, all their adsense/adwords data for every customer, and most likely they store all that information in multiple places. Oh yes, can't forget about storing all the videos from youtube/google video, thats probably a LOT of data there, plus its most likely a massive amount of bandwidth as well.

Google: SC and OR; Microsoft: Quincy, WA

The summary leaves me scratching my head because the Quincey project is a Microsoft data center, nothing to do with Google. Google is building a data center in The Dalles, Oregon, right on the Columbia River.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001262 [computerworld.com]

Quincy is near enough to the Columbia to have cheap hydro power, but I just looked at the map and it's not right on the Columbia like The Dalles. I wonder if Google will use water from the Columbia to help cool their data center; and I wonder what the plan is for the Quincy data center. (Ordinary air conditioning? That part of Washington is cold in the winter but hot in the summer.)

steveha

Nucular in SC

In SC, we have the highest percentage of electricity supplied from nuclear (nucular?) power, so I have heard.

This may help protect us from a rise in oil prices, I hope.

And we are building more reactors at existing sites. Not only are we a dumping ground for nuclear waste, we also have tons of power available, and our beaches are nice too...

Maybe

They're going to introduce now Gmail with 1TB now that 1giga it's not enough for many of us...

Re:Nice locations

Google Maps says it's 558 miles / 8 hours 10 minutes from Berkeley County SC to Washington, DC. By way of comparison, it's just 7 hours 32 minutes from Tampa, Florida. I would not call it "close". Come now. You're in Tennessee? You should know this part of the country better than THAT. Especially if you want to comment on it. Sure, it's five or six hours closer to DC than you, but...

Re:Nice locations

Yea, but you're forgetting how close Quincy is to The Gorge [hob.com].

Re:Nice locations

Yes, what better place to build a data center than TORNADO ALLEY.

Re:Nice locations

They still have to get people to work there. "Hey, come work for google, in the middle of BFE".

Re:Nice locations

You have to realize Lenoir is home to row after row of shuttered furniture factories that burned gobs of power night and day for decades. Power is especially cheap now!

Re:Nice locations

Open land and cheap power, yeah, that's it.

No kidding. If it was really about open land and cheap power there would be up here [google.ca]. Surrounded by empty land and hydro electric power. With the added bonus of being much cooler especially in winter.

Re:Nice locations

It's pretty obvious you didn't bother to look at a map before you posted this. Or any statistics or BEC information either.

Bzzzt!

Re:Nice locations

My bet it has more to do with states that offer massive tax breaks to businesses for moving in. I know North Carolina is famous for it, especially with the new Dell facility in Greensboro and Lenovo in RTP. The Dell deal was so good the state could have employed everyone hired by Dell for 11 years with the tax breaks and loans.

Re:South Carolina

You think it's an accident that they picked the state with the lowest high school graduation rate in the country?

OK, I'll bite, not enough people know anyway. South Carolina has some horrible school districts, but I write this from the location in SC with the highest per capita concentration of engineers in the country, and home to installations or headquarters to more Fortune 500 companies than areas 5 times it's size. SC is bringing in technology and knowledge based industry to dig itself out of the hole it's found itself in, and Google is taking advantage of the likely tax breaks, and a nearby pool of talent.

Happier here than up North. (but my kids still go to private school...)

Re:Too Bad About Bandwidth

As far as I know, the vast majority of Google's employees do in-fact work inside the United States for Google, with only tiny offices with a handful of employees in other parts of the world. I could be wrong though...

Re:Nice locations

Heh, besides if Google were into cheap power and land, they'd probably put it in a state like Washington or the Carolinas rather than Washington or the Carolinas.

Re:Nice locations

you build a data center in Oklahoma or Kansas

Apparently, Google is building in Oklahoma [tulsaworld.com], too.