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virtuallynathan | 1 year ago

Facebook has more datacenter space and power than Amazon, Google, and Microsoft -- possibly more than Amazon and Microsoft combined...

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jedberg|1 year ago

Unless you've worked at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, or a whole bunch of datacenter providers, I'm not sure how you could make that claim. They don't really share that information freely, even in their stock reports.

Heck I worked at Amazon and even then I couldn't tell you the total datacenter space, they don't even share it internally.

virtuallynathan|1 year ago

You can just map them all... I have. I also worked at AWS :)

virtuallynathan|1 year ago

To date, facebook has built, or is building, 47,100,000 sq ft of space, totaling nearly $24bn in investment. Based on available/disclosed power numbers and extrapolating per sqft, I get something like 4770MW.

Last I updated my spreadsheet in 2019, Google had $17bn in investments across their datacenters, totaling 13,260,000 sq ft of datacenter space. Additional buildings have been built since then, but not to the scale of an additional 30mil sq ft.

Amazon operates ~80 datacenter buildings in Northern Virginia, each ~200,000 sq ft -- about 16,000,000sq ft total in that region, the other regions are much much smaller, perhaps another 4 mil sq ft. When I'm bored I'll go update all my maps and spreadsheets.

the-rc|1 year ago

Does the square footage take into account multiple floors? What's the source? It can be misleading, because you don't know the compute density of what's inside. Using just public data, power is a more accurate proxy. Until at least 5-6 years ago, Google was procuring more electricity than Amazon. Before that, it had a further advantage from lower PUE, but I bet the big names are all comparable on that front by now. Anyone that has worked at several of them can infer that FB is not the largest (but it's still huge).

As for the dollars, were they just in 2019 or cumulative? The Google ones seem low compared to numbers from earnings.

samstave|1 year ago

At this point Power Companies (ala PG&E, etc) should be investing in AI companies in a big way. THen they make money off the AI companies to build out power infra - and vice versa.

I am surprised we havent heard about private electrical grid built out by such companies.

Surely they all have some owned power generation, but then if they do, the local areas where they DO build out power plants - they should have to build capacity for the local area, mayhaps in exchange for the normal tax subsidies they seek for all these large capital projects.

Cant wait until we pods/clusters in orbit. With radioisotope batteries to power them along with the panels. (I wonder how close to a node a RI battery can be? Can each node have its own RI?) (sas they can produce upto "several KW" -- but I cant find a reliable source for max wattage of an RI...)

SpaceX should build an ISS module thats an AI DC cluster.

And have all the ISS technologies build its LLM there based on all the data they create?

virtuallynathan|1 year ago

I updated my map for AWS in Northern Virginia -- came up with 74 buildings (another source says 76, so i'll call it directionally correct). If I scale my sq ft by ~5% to account for missing buildings, we get 11,500,000sq ft in the northern virginia area for AWS.

I'll finish my other maps and share them later...

VirusNewbie|1 year ago

But Google built data centers aren't the only data centers google is running their machine fleet in...

dsp|1 year ago

[citation needed]

karmasimida|1 year ago

I don't think so, AWS hasn't disclosed this numbers, like datacenter spaces occupied, so how do you know.

virtuallynathan|1 year ago

I have mapped every AWS data center globally, and I worked at AWS.

Facebook publishes this data.

pgwhalen|1 year ago

I have zero evidence, but this seems extremely unlikely. Do you have more than zero evidence?

meiraleal|1 year ago

Meta can use all their datacenter space while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft datacenter space is mostly rented.