Microsoft, Yahoo, spend hundreds of millions on data centers
The cost of new data centers is rapidly rising, Slashdot notes, as the glut of facilities built during the bubble dries up. Once available on the cheap thanks to dotcom bankruptcies, the mammoth computer-hosting facilities now cost $100 million and up to build, and can consume as much electricity as a small city. Yahoo and Microsoft are rolling their own data centers -- large, warehouse-like spaces outfitted with cooling equipment and cages for rack after rack of server computers -- because of the shortage of space, and Equinix, a data-center operator, is opening new centers in Chicago and Los Angeles. Slashdot readers are posing keen questions about the trend -- why not, asks one, refit abandoned industrial buildings in cities like Detroit where land is cheap? But it turns out that the cost of electricity, not land, is the major factor in choosing sites, which is why locations like Quincy, Wash. and San Antonio, Texas are becoming the new hot spots for data centers.
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