Residents in and around Bessemer are furious over Project Marvel, a plan to build a 4.5-million-square-foot data processing facility on 700 acres of wooded land. Public officials have been sworn to silence.
If built to planned capacity, the data center would be one of the largest in the United States and could become one of the largest single consumers of electricity in the state. Of nearly a dozen residents interviewed by Inside Climate News, none expressed support for the project as planned. Instead, all shared fear and frustration over their inability to obtain information about the $14.5 billion proposal from politicians charged with representing the public.
Efforts by Inside Climate News to speak with public officials in Bessemer about the proposal, called Project Marvel, were met with silence. The mayor, his chief of staff and the city’s attorney all signed a non-disclosure agreement with the developer, staffers said, and would not be able to answer questions about the project.
Say what you want about Alabama and its people, but I don’t know if there’s a single area of North America that gets more consistently fucked by their elected officials than the Bible Belt.
This project will almost definitely go through and it won’t be long until we hear about how the natural freshwater resources in the area have been completely ruined by this project.
Also, why do these data centers need to be so fucking huge? Why can’t they be put in, you know, older, vacant commercial properties that are generating no rent income right now? Just put little data centers all over the place. It’s also much harder to target many small locations than one absolutely fucking massive one in the event of a conflict.
Economy of scale. Baseline functions (fire suppression, physical security, floor load capacity, liquid cooling, etc.) get less expensive per square foot as you scale up. Remarkably, owning a DC is not a highly profitable business. It’s become a commodity. We lease at scale rather than own.
Power cost is a big deal, too. Finding a location with low $/Mwatt is a primary concern. Each rack in my new DC is rated for 130kw. We have 60,000 sqft - though it isn’t all full due to lack of local power delivery. In the near future, an additional (several GW) substation will be built on campus.
There are often enormous tax rebates in play, too. And sweet deals for local contractors during the buildout. And future local employment assurances.
Finally, large construction projects are famous for the ability to hide graft. The bigger the better.
Oh, and we ARE globally distributed. Mine is a smaller site.
They should probably throw a few bucks at finding ways to reduce power consumption. It’s astounding at how little thought most industrial facilities give to finding and fixing energy loss. I’ll bet they don’t review code or systems processes for it at all.