Microsoft To Spend $1 Billion On Datacenters In North Carolina - Slashdot
source link: https://slashdot.org/story/22/11/11/2213234/microsoft-to-spend-1-billion-on-datacenters-in-north-carolina
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Microsoft To Spend $1 Billion On Datacenters In North Carolina
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"Microsoft will get performance-based incentive grants of 50 percent real property value and 85 percent personal property value, to be awarded over ten years. This means that over that period, the local government bodies will essentially pay back that proportion of Microsoft's property taxes"
Given that a datacenter is basically a server warehouse with power and cooling needs, very lightly staffed(and mostly by comparatively low skill/non 'tech' roles, HVAC and electrical on the high end, some security guards and general custodian/handiman postings; maybe a few lightweight screwdriver monkeys if the econonomics indicate that some amount of local FRU swapping makes sense); if you are refunding massive chunks of property tax you are giving back more or less the only thing you were going to get out of the arrangement, aside from (potentially, if they don't just bring in their preferred outside experts) during the building phase.
My experience has been that even noob-tier small business/branch office/comparatively under-resourced K-12 education scenarios don't actually require that many man hours per server per year; and that's with effectively zero expertise in provisioning or orchestration, some hardware that doesn't even have a BMC that provides a network-accessible console, and small enough systems that most of the servers are lovingly maintained pets rather than expendable bulk livestock. Slightly further up the food chain, in medium business land, going more than a year without someone poking their head into the colo is unexceptional; and the hyperscaler guys are on the bleeding edge of hands-off management. There's just not going to be anything going on once they get the place up and going.
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Maybe some payola taking place?
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by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday November 12, 2022 @03:32AM (#63045129)
Humidity, rednecks, christians who do the exact opposite of christ, racism, no abortion rights
The data center will be built in the mountains of western NC, which have a pleasant climate. It is about an hour from Charlotte.
Abortion is legal in NC.
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by CaptQuark ( 2706165 ) on Saturday November 12, 2022 @02:08AM (#63045067)
All four locations are about 45 miles northwest of Charlotte, NC, one of the little-known tech centers in the south. Charlotte was recently ranked the No. 1 tech town in America by CompTIA.
If the nearby population is tech savvy, land prices are cheap, power is cheap, and the local municipalities are willing to give Microsoft favorable tax breaks, it would seem a tempting place to build at least some of the 50+ new data centers they plan to build each year.
https://www.zdnet.com/educatio... [zdnet.com]
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Given how this has played out elsewhere, I'm sure that some Microsoft flunky convinced the powers-that-be that this data center would somehow serve as an anchor that would subsequently attract many more high-tech businesses - which in turn will, eventually, employ many more people.
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by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday November 11, 2022 @11:55PM (#63044987)
I suppose that for the very reason you said (lightly staffed), datacenters don't draw much on the municipal services that are funded by property taxes. How many police and EMT callouts can a datacenter possibly get in a year compared to an apartment complex? -
This is a very lightly-populated area with very little economic opportunity, but not that far from a major city.
In other words, there was nothing going on in those 687 acres, or the 1000 surrounding them. So the land is cheap, the small number of workers are cheap, and the photons don't have to travel very far to reach it from Charlotte.
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