This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land.
Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.
Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors of Data Centers.
I think Downtown Seattle has a bunch too (including near Amazon campus). I just looked up one random one and they have about half the total reported building square footage of a 10-story building used for a datacenter: https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle
Where a random malicious president can't just hijack the government and giga-companies can't trivially lobby lawmakers for profits at the expense of citizens?
So why does he not build here in Europe then? Getting a permit for building a data center in Sweden is just normal industrial zoning that anyone can get for cheap, there is plenty of it. Only challenge is getting enough electricity.
I meant Europe is an example of how not to do regulation. The problem you just mentioned. If you get land easily electricity won't be available and vice versa.
Then maybe you should move here. We have in most cases well functioning regulations. Of course there are counter examples where it has been bad but data centers is not one of them. It is easy to get permits to build one.
There's also a bunch of countries pretty much begging companies to come and build solar arrays. If you rocked up in Australia and said "I'm building a zero-emission data center we'll power from PV" we'd pretty much fall over ourselves to let you do it. Plus you know, we have just a bonkers amount of land.
There is already a Tesla grid levelling battery in South Australia. If what you're really worried about is regulations making putting in the renewable energu expensive, then boy have I got a geopolitically stable, tectonically stable, first-world country where you can do it.
I'm confused, wouldn't this be just using the power of the government to enforce short-sighted, tech-hostile regulations like "datacenters should not poison people"?
