North America Added a Whole Silicon Valley's Worth of Data Center Inventory This Year

North America's eight primary data center markets added 515 megawatts (MW) of new supply in the first half of 2024 -- the equivalent of Silicon Valley's entire existing inventory -- according to a new report real-estate services firm CBRE. From a report: All of Silicon Valley has 459 MW of data center supply, while those main markets have a total of 5,689 MW. That's up 10% from a year ago and about double what it was five years ago. Data center space under construction is up nearly 70% from a year ago and is currently at a record high. But the vast majority of that is already leased, and vacancy rates have shrunk to a record low of 2.8%. In other words, developers are building an insane amount of data center capacity, but it's still not enough to meet the growing demands of cloud computing and artificial intelligence providers.

We had the .com-edy

[DarkOx]

Well we had the .com-edy, will this turn out to be the Artificial Insanity?

At least we might get a ready supply of dirt cheap VPS, used enterprise class hardware again..

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[Junta]

Unfortunately this time much of the surplus wouldn''t be very appealing for folks. Massive electricity hogs with "who cares about noise, ramp the fans all the way up".

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[PPH]

And the facilities can be repurposed to house the homeless.

Re: We had the .com-edy

[flyingfsck]

That is a lot of Artificial Insemination.

How many Eiffel Towers is that?

[Tony Isaac]

Or Olympic size swimming pools?

I have no idea how big SV's "inventory" is. Do you?

And how is a megawatt a measure of data center capacity?

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[BeepBoopBeep]

Agreed, this article dumb as shit. It mentions power consumption and vacancy rates within the same article and I cant tell the point of it.

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[Mspangler]

"And how is a megawatt a measure of data center capacity?"

Well it's certainly a very important measure, but it does seem odd. Is it the least common denominator? How would you compare AI results output to video streams served or One Drive files stashed? Energy dissipation seems as reasonable as anything.

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[Tony Isaac]

With each passing year, processor speeds go up and power consumption goes down. Maybe not quite Moore's Law anymore, but improvements are still happening. So a MW of 3-year-old servers is not equivalent to a MW of new servers. Perhaps server count would be a better measure?

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[Mspangler]

How many file servers to equal an AI server? You don't need a rack full of 4090 cards or whatever to store the vacation pictures.

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[Megane]

I wanted to know how many Libraries of Congress that is.

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[CEC-P]

Most run at a static capacity so they just ignore the "hours" factor, especially since it's actually referring to a max capacity in amps that can be supplied by the mains and we're pretty sure what the voltage would be.

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[joller]

And how is a megawatt a measure of data center capacity?

The two measures that define most data centres are commissioned power capacity and cooling capacity, which are obviously related. Data Centres are basically real estate with power and cooling assurance. Contracts with big customers, like hyperscalers - Microsoft, AWS, Meta, Google etc are then struck based on maximum power consumption, when contracts with smaller organisations that buy racks/pods/data halls worth of space are often converted from the power metrics. so i.e. you'll pay differently for a 15kW

An investment opportunity

[ZipNada]

Those data centers are a huge expenditure of money and effort, it is a gold star vote of confidence for AI and other tech.

"That demand has sent national rental rates up 6.5% on average and much higher for newer premium spaces in premium markets."

https://money.usnews.com/inves... [usnews.com]

Confused

[SmaryJerry]

Is this really comparing the entire country to just one city for some reason? Just because headquarters are located there does not mean data centers are all located there. Servers need to be in proximity to the customers they serve to reduce time lag.

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[CAIMLAS]

No it's just sensationalism.

Silicon Valley hasn't been the biggest hub of the Internet since the 90s or early 2000s, I'd wager.

Northern Virginia has twice as much of a DC presence and likely many times the capacity, followed up by Texas and California as a whole. Chicago area, NY, FL and WA/OR all have a similar number of datacenters.

From what I can tell, SV is just in the top 10 locations, and just barely. Better to go north to Oregon or South to Phoenix or LA... or Vegas, for that matter. So much cheaper

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[NoWayNoShapeNoForm]

Is this really comparing the entire country to just one city for some reason? Just because headquarters are located there does not mean data centers are all located there. Servers need to be in proximity to the customers they serve to reduce time lag.

Boi talk about a case of severe case of GOTTA HAVE IT NOW

Like a few 10s of milliseconds is going to matter to AI.

It really bothers me

[rsilvergun]

that we're using all this electricity and energy and there's little to no indication it's going to be beneficial to the general populace. If anything it's likely to make things worse, so far the only reason to build out this much capacity is for LLMs that are used to replace jobs, meaning more layoffs.

I'm tired of living in a world that's openly hostile to my mere existence.

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[joller]

The AI revolution is certainly driving additional capacity requirements, but even without it, all the cloud providers have been taking as much capacity as they could get.

As to benefits to society - modern data centres and clous solutions are a lot more energy efficient and sustainable then equipment sitting in server rooms cooled by building air conditioning systems.

Cheaper to operate at scale, and certainly a lot more reliable.

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[danielcolchete]

I understand what you're saying, and you are correct: a lot of jobs that exist today will become a thing of the past in the next 10 - 20 years. I like to look at things positively, maybe further down the road...

In every revolutionary step our society took (making fire, the wheel, agriculture, aqueducts, books, press, industrial revolution, electricity, cars, mainframes, personal computers, internet, ...) the result was that there was a strong demand for what the revolution could provide. There were always e

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[JBeretta]

I'm tired of living in a world that's openly hostile to my mere existence.

I'm tired of living in a world inhabited by idiots who don't know (or care) that they are living in the best time that has ever existed. Woe is you! Name a better time. I'll wait..

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[natx808]

you can either get with technology or stand by the wayside. if you think there's no obvious benefit i feel sorry for you. document summarization alone is a game changer. its just like the printing press, washing machine, internet, google, etc. just another major advancement of technology for mankind.

AI scaling

[awwshit]

AI, in it's current form, does not scale.

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[GoTeam]

AI, in it's current form, does not scale.

Will it work for scale?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[awwshit]

Wouldn't know, I'm not all strung out on the LLM.

They would have installed double that..

[Hadlock]

They would have installed double that but nobody can get firm commitments from power companies. Everyone wants to build 100mw of data center for AI yesterday, but there's just not that kind of spare capacity on the grid.

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[John.Banister]

They should build 20MW Data Centers with containerized 20MW microreactor power supply.

need SMRs...now

[natx808]

we really need small nuclear reactors to power the crazy power this AI infrastructure build out is going to need.

And how much power generation capacity?

[sinkskinkshrieks]

Probably not very much.

SV has water/power shortage

[CuriousButterfly]

One thing this story misses is that Silicon Valley has significant water and power constraints compared to other locations. Blackouts and hose pipes bans are common there. Most of the capacity in the US and indeed the world is built in Virginia about 60 miles south of Washington DC that has fewer power and water constraints and is right next to mainline communication trunks on the East Coast. In 2024 Northern Virginia had 2.5 GW of capacity compared to 1000 for Londond and Tokyo. In contrast, Silicon Valley