I was looking into the new, probably AI, data center being built in town and noticed it’s built by a private equity backed firm. The data center was rejected by the city and has to operate with a standard cooperate building water supply. They said are switching to air cooling only and reducing the compute power to keep power usage the same. This has caused amazon, the alleged operator, to back out. So they are building a giant reduced capacity data center with no operator and apparently still think that’s a good idea. My understanding of the private equity bubble is that the firms can hide “under performing” assets because it’s all private. From what I read, possibly 3.2 Trillion dollars of it. I feel like this new data center is going on the “under performing” pile.
Racks/cabinets, fiber optic cables, PDUs, CAT6 (OOBM network), top-of-rack switches, aggregation switches, core switches, core routers, external multi-homed ISP/transit connectivity, megawatt three-phase power feeds from the electric utility, internal power distribution and step-down transformers, physical security and alarm systems, badge access, high-strength raised floor, plenum spaces for hot/cold aisles, massive chiller units.
Yes, that’s rack space. It is not even half of the costs of a data center. I know because I’ve worked in data centers and read the financial breakdowns of those materials. They are also useless without actual servers and deprecrate their value really fast.