We operate nearly 900 servers, and I believe the capital of cloud infrastructure is Amsterdam, NL. The concentration of ASNs in Amsterdam is incredible. In contrast, Ashburn, Dallas, and LA seem to lack ASN diversity, primarily being dominated by singular big tech companies. Cities like Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Istanbul, and New York, however, have a greater concentration of smaller cloud hosting businesses, offering more diversity.
> In contrast, Ashburn, Dallas, and LA seem to lack ASN diversity, primarily being dominated by singular big tech companies
I don't think you understand the scale of the "Ashburn Metro Area." It is upwards of 250 buildings (maybe 50 of which are "big tech companies") compared to the 70 or so in Amsterdam.
Are you familiar with what ASNs actually are? That is like saying Delaware is the biggest US state by land mass because every large company is incorporated there.
You can both be right, and that's OK :) While you seem mostly concerned with "amount of served/handled data", parent seems to be more concerned with diversity, both are valid ways to judge what makes a "data center capital".
I don't think they're saying Amsterdam is the biggest country because of ASN diversity, but if someone says "What is the data center capital of the world?" both ways would be valid ways to understand the answer.
Size and scale of an AS doesn't necessarily correlate with running a lot of data centers (as measured in megawatts). For instance cogent, hurricane, arelion and others have numerous worldwide POPs and are generally ranked in a top 15 list of AS by size and scale, but they're not building and running multi megawatt datacenters. Both Amsterdam and Frankfurt have a huge collection of ISPs, hosting companies, telcos and others, as evidenced by the traffic levels of the AMSIX and DE-CIX.
I worked as a developer for an enterprise hosting company back in 2005. I took servers out to Ashburn a couple of times.
I had visited many data centers in Michigan but this place was at a completely different level. High level of security and more cages than I had ever seen before. It was like a little town with street signs so you could find your cage. Lots of logos of famous Internet companies.
The fans were so loud my ears were ringing for hours afterward. This was before the common use of hearing protection and I have no idea how people worked in there all day.
The real answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East
Then the real real answer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUNET
I remember being awed by the size of the new data center at the Ashburn UUNET campus when we first occupied the campus. It was one of our new “NFL” sites. They were called that because the locations where we built the new large data centers matched up pretty well with cities with NFL teams. It now looks like a small garden shed in comparison to the newer data centers around it.
Whoah, that brings me back.
Yeah I was wondering where that part was. This article is missing the trees for the forrest.
It’s like saying trade port hubs are there because of the weather and ignoring the major river they sat on.
MAE East is there.
If you wanted good interconnect to the west coast and the rest of the world, you needed to be in or near MAE East.
Convenient to CIA HQ and "Liberty Crossing"?
bold of you to assume the CIA needs physical proximity
Also bold to assume anyone working at Langley would think going to Ashburn is “convenient.” :-)
No, but the FBI does. One time in a data center in Ashburn I read the label on a box in a mysterious cage, and it said WYLTK, LLC.
WYLTK means "wouldn't you like to know".
I did want to know, and discovered that it's a front for the FBI.
does it though? narratives can always be spun, enemies crafted, and people killed such is the way of the world no matter how much we pretend to live in a different reality
was it cool FBI at least? one of the many nodes for aggregating data perchance or same old SSO
The article states it is from 2019. So not sure if things have changed.
I'm surprised how many data centers there are in Hillsboro, Oregon. And they have more under construction at the moment. I wonder where Hillsboro ranks?
Things have changed since 2019. The data center capacity in the Ashburn area has increased significantly since then and much more capacity is currently in development.
The formatting of the article ("Blog Image 3Until recently...") strongly suggests this was copied from somewhere else.
As for the content - I'd say a tl;dr is "first mover advantage" followed by network effects. Assume you wanted to provide a service to the Internet at large, so you went to where you can get the best and cheapest connectivity, and the first movers had all the advantage, at least in a time where latency didn't matter because all end-users had was a 56k modem. And ideally, you went to a place where you knew other big dogs are, because they will have ironed out the kinks, making it less risky for you - in a city where there are tons of existing large names you can expect a way more fault tolerant network than if you go to some small town in the outback where one drunk backhoe driver can take out the entire town's electricity or network.
These days the calculation is different - customers have high bandwidth these days but also they are highly sensitive to latency, so you gotta be as close to your audience as possible, and you build your entire architecture to be fault-tolerant as compute has gotten incredibly cheap.
> [...] surpass 1 gigawatt of overall data center capacity.
> [...] with only about half the capacity, at 559 megawatts (MWs) of inventory.
I didn't know that the physical unit for the rate of energy transfer, or more simple just power, is also an unit for computing power. After all it's the same word, right?
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Energy consumption is directly correlated to heat production. The capacity of a datacenter is basically its capacity to keep servers cool. That's why datacenter capacity is measured in watts.
Tell me you don't datacenter without telling me you don't datacenter.
Yeah, I am just a programmer. TIL that datacenter capacity uses the unit Watt. I didn't believe it first, thought, again these journalists being confused about units. Not the first time.