Wow. This is a pretty bald-faced lie by Google. They're defining "datacenter" very narrowly in a way that lets them hide their actual footprint. E.g, they're ignoring the various caches they have in the SF Bay Area, NYC, and other metropolitan locations. Back when they were running Stadia, their claim was that they had edge nodes single-digit milliseconds from major population centers. They also run their servers in datacenters which are technically not owned by "Google". That's why Google Cloud has an us-west2 near LA not on this map but their GCP site makes different claims from this website: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations
I've been looking for datacenter tech job. With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier. Guess there's a lot of them being built but none near there, or are companies being secretive about that, staffing internally? Am I looking in the wrong places ? (Usual job hunting sites, linkedin)
Microsoft is listing positions on their public job board (I know because I'm nosy and they're building a big data center complex a few miles from me). They look like good jobs for the area. A couple pay over $100K and only require a high school diploma for what looks to be essentially security guard roles.
> With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier.
Data centers don't need very many employees once they are built, many have less than 20 employees.
This is a big part of the reason why they are such a bad long term deal for localities and why giving them tax breaks, etc is just a scam. They add a lot more negative externalities than they help with the local economy.
A warehouse of equivalent size in square feet often doesn't have many more employees, if it's just a bunch of truck docks and people driving forklifts.
That's also a problem but a modern one. Only a generation or two ago an industrial property of that size might employ four figures worth of hands and employ most of the neighborhood or town in question.
I was confused at first but it seems like the site lists for google products only, doesn't seem to list some of the regions google cloud is available in (such as nothing in shown in Canada). But scrolling down it has a link to Google cloud regions.
Not a Google employee. Last I recall, the only place in Africa that stood to benefit from local infrastructure was South Africa, yet because of how geographically isolated it was from the next nearest hop, latency and packet loss were just intolerable. The latter should be solvable, though the former was dependent on closer neighbors. Same goes for Australia, more or less. I’m curious why there isn’t more demand in Nigeria or Kenya though!
not really sure its a wise choice to disclose datacenters anymore publicly. Just increases attack vector and not very value adding to people. most customers care about latency and as long as you can point to a region where you are its enough
Finding a datacenter from aerial or space photos isn't hard if you know how to identify a heat exchanger or huge generator. Both of which are very distinctive. Then limit that search set to certain sizes of big rectangular buildings. And ones with relatively low counts of passenger cars parked during mid day times.
Kinda hard to hide them when you choose to build them in people’s backyards and ask them for a local tax break. The Meta ones near me are very visible.
Data centers don't need very many employees once they are built, many have less than 20 employees.
This is a big part of the reason why they are such a bad long term deal for localities and why giving them tax breaks, etc is just a scam. They add a lot more negative externalities than they help with the local economy.
https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-hired-375-people-for-moun...
> Nobody lives there
Africa has just under 20% of the world's population.
How many of these would have to get destroyed for them to go out of business?
Also easily found potential military targets: power generation, water treatment, hospitals, schools, government buildings, etc.
Transparency is good.