ティージェーグレェ on Nostr: All this talk of grids (smart or otherwise) and the mass media fixation datacenters ...

All this talk of grids (smart or otherwise) and the mass media fixation datacenters in recent years with the A"I" bubble, has had me thinking though; like so SF recently put a 45 moratorium on building new datacenters or expanding them (e.g. https://www.sf.gov/news-supervisor-walton-to-introduce-moratorium-on-ai-data-centers-in-san-francisco).

Yet, I don't think a new datacenter has been built in SF in decades?

Jävla Fan (nprofile…3c8d) can probably correct me if I am wrong; since we talked about this very sort of subject, many years ago. Yet I think a lot of that (datacenters not being built out for decades in SF) had to do with: paucity of power.

San Francisco's fog has a nickname, Karl. Solar isn't likely to be particularly practical. Maybe, you could do some tidal wave power generation? Yet, at scale? And not offend the environmentalists? Or the cargo ships bringing things into the port of Oakland? GLWT.

Not to mention, SF is small. As it is, many of the houses are built with no stand offs, shared walls with your neighbors (it's awful, really; particularly given how expensive housing is in SF and how horridly devastating the fires were after the 1906 earthquake).

Where would you even put such a modern monstrosity as the sorts of datacenters being built out in other realms?

I think maybe one of the 365 Main (now probably Digital Realty Trust) in Oakland was one of the last "new" datacenters built in the region? Which: was a really long time ago, and also: part of Alameda County, not under San Francisco's jurisdiction anyway. I guess Oakland, also passed a 45 day moratorium this month (e.g. https://oaklandside.org/2026/10/07/oakland-data-center-moratorium-approved/) and that is impacting one potential data center build out: Behring Companies, 20,000 sqft facility.

I don't know if you know much about data centers; yet 20,000 sqft is tiny.

The Porn Palace (former home to CyberNet Entertainment Media, before they moved into the San Francisco Armory) was 60,000 square feet. The SF Armory? Closer to 200,000 to 300,000 square feet. Moreover, we didn't have datacenter stuff in those locations; we had fiber from those locations: run to the datacenters where we had such gear racked. (Really, one of my improvements when I started at the Porn Palace in 2007 was to take a "stack" of servers they had piled on top of each other, and rack mounted them. "Amateur hour" would be an understatement. Their previous sysadmin was also moonlighting some contract gigs and had configured their 20 some odd web servers to be RAID0 [which has a multiplicative rate of failure for every disk added, which was happening about once a week, to give himself an excuse to "gotta drive to the datacenter to rebuild a RAID array on a webserver" wherein he would go to his other contract employers or something I guess?)

So to me, the whole "SF bans datacenters" seems as if it is performative politics?

Last time I had badge access to the "largest peering point in California" it was SV1, which is in Silly Con Valley, not SF. Moreover, there are other datacenters closer to that locale on municipal power such as SVP (Silicon Valley Power); which after the whole Enron price gouging ordeal decades ago, is a safer stance for power hungry needs anyway.

I guess, maybe it may make some folks feel good in Oakland or SF that there are month and a half moratoriums on datacenter build outs and expansions, yet I really don't think Oakland or SF are the heart of where those problems are anyway. The forests were long since cut down here already. ;(

The divide between the rich and the poor, continues to widen; datacenters are less vital than housing (California is supposedly at least 3 million units short of what is needed to adequately house its current populace). The big tech broligarchs have mostly taken all the marbles long ago.

Heck, remember when Google (back in their "don't be evil" hah! Long before convicted monopoly Alphabet Inc. era) ran its first two hosting providers out of business, because they were charging by rack space, not power draw and Google was cramming something like 4 shitty motherboards onto one piece of particle board with a single power supply (not good for fault tolerance, yet definitely cheap and dense) to maximize their rack space allotments? Running a hosting provider out of business?! Friggin bonkers.

It's not the dot bomb era anymore; whatever we are contending with presently, seems, in many ways: worse.