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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Notice there aren't many on the Maryland side. One fo the reasons is zoning.

Datacenters aren't all bad. They provide very high-paying jobs (IT engineers) and they need people 24/7 so it's steady work. But, it only takes a few to man a datacenter with the footprint of a small shopping mall.[/quote]

I don't think they hire that many people. I've always heard everything mostly runs itself.[/quote]

I'm in the industry. Stuff breaks, and when it does, you need it back up fast because there are SLAs (contracts) about downtime. The larger companies run some tasks, like support/operations center centralized at one location, but for on-site staff at night it will be 1-2 engineers, and 1-2 security guards at a minimum. That's to cover when something breaks like a hard drive needs to be swapped or a network cable needs to be plugged in.

Then you have the day shift + on-call people, and that will be 5-10 engineers who do maintenance but also planning, along with general facilities like loading dock/shipping, HVAC maintenance (huge job due to all the cooling needs). That's the on-site jobs. The engineers make at least $100k.

So.. with the amount of space they take up, you could build a strip mall and that would be hundreds of jobs, compared to let's say 30-50 total at a datacenter. But the datacenter jobs pay very well (try finding a network engineer willing to work an on-site night shift!) and come with full benefits, often including stock options.

Also the datacenters are usually located in industrial areas where you couldn't put much else like a mall. They are working on the footprint issues -- new datacenters have 2-3 floors now, and also power, since it's a huge cost to them so everyone is incentivized to get consumption down. My last company leased space in a datacenter for our equipment and we paid by the amp for power, and it wasn't cheap.

They're kind of a necessary evil, unless you want to stop using the internet. And also go back to working from office full-time since datacenters power all the tools you need to work remotely.[/quote]

Most people are not against data centers. People in NOVA (mainly PWC and Loudoun) are just frustrated the BOCS that are approving them everywhere with no consideration for the impact on residential neighborhoods. Loudoun County has approved around 40 million sq ft of data centers and PWC has approved around 90 million sq ft of data centers. There is 80 million square feet that has yet to be built in PWC and the electricity demands are enormous. 80 million square feet, the will require anywhere from 1600 to 8000 megawatt (likely the higher end of this range). Just for perspective, the Lake Anna nuclear power plant has generation capacity of 1800 MW. So the data center projects in PWC alone will likely require new grid capacity equivalent to multiple nuclear power plants. [/quote]

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