Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/20/google-is-investing-3-3b-to-build-clean-data-centers-in-europe/

by yibllesqueak • 7 years ago

295 147 7 years ago

techcrunch.com

sha666sum• 7 years ago

Non-shortened url: https://techerati.com/news-hub/google-3-billion-data-centres...

grezql• 7 years ago

This is not relevant to the article, but why is there so many full screen popups with newsletter on american websites?

I have never ever written my email on such form. The first thing I do when I see it is to close it and think its a low-budget website or something.

tudelo2• 7 years ago

Plenty of high budget websites have this, and often they come back if you dismiss them. I would rather the site just deny me up front.

josephpmay• 7 years ago

Newsletters can be incredibly profitable for media organizations because it 1) gets people to return to your content on a regular basis 2) can allow for more targeted advertising

I personally hate this trend, but almost everybody's doing it these days

umeshunni• 7 years ago

and (3) are vastly cheaper than other forms of advertising since they are not paying any platform provider for the ads.

tpmx• 7 years ago

Working link:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/20/google-is-investing-3-3b-t...

M2Ys4U• 7 years ago

God I hate Oath's awful privacy modal.

cameronbrown3• 7 years ago

I think that's the point..

tantalor• 7 years ago

God I hate Oath's awful privacy modal.

What is "Oath"?

shmageggy• 7 years ago

Anyone got a source that doesn't require an afternoon's worth of work to set your privacy options? I clicked through a bunch of menus to try to opt out of personalization and got nowhere and gave up

senko• 7 years ago

TLDR from the TechCrunch article:

This [...] is in addition to the $7 billion the company has invested since 2007 in the EU, [...] today’s announcement was focused on Google’s commitment to building data centers running on clean energy.

octosphere• 7 years ago

Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? As a one-man startup guy, I feel everything I do pales in comparison to what Google are doing and I feel nothing more than /eclipsed/ by them. I have found myself wondering: "If you can't beat them join them" on many occasions. I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying?

jrempel• 7 years ago

Google can only do so many things. Every avenue needs to have a significant impact. Google is also a SV echo chamber. They have a lot of blind spots. Lots of room for smaller startups to carve a niche. After get large enough to get Google's full competitive attention another story.

satanspastaroll3• 7 years ago

You are correct, google is trying to cover all sectors they can, and offer tools to join them even at a loss. After they own everything, they can start raising prices, dictate web standards and so on

dantheman4• 7 years ago

Your worst case scenario has never happened.

tudelo2• 7 years ago

They may run some operations at a loss, but overall?

wongarsu2• 7 years ago

I think we can make useful distinctions here between Google services.

- Google Search/Ads and Google Cloud are money makers. They are constantly improved, handled with care and have prices comparable to the competition, maybe slightly lower

- Chrome is costing massive amounts of money. Between the massive development effort and the big worldwide marketing campaigns Google must have spent billions on Chrome in a play to protect their other services and dictate web standards. Android also belongs in this category, dictating a massive portion of the mobile market

- GMail/GSuite, Youtube, Google Home etc probably about break even. Like the previous category they are strategic plays aimed at controlling a market, and they are great for the brand. But since their markets are less valuable they are the step children

- lastly we have the experiments. Google has cut most of them, and you are probably better off not using them at all

jwr• 7 years ago

It's easy: find a niche which is too small for Google or any other large company to bother with. There are plenty of those, especially if you look for something tied to the physical world (serving real businesses around you) and if you avoid the SV echo chamber (which means HN much of the time, too). In other words, don't try to be another Google, Facebook, Uber, or Bird. Do something specialized.

(I'm a self-funded entrepreneur)

reportgunner• 7 years ago

Hang in there, the end is near.

JohnJamesRambo• 7 years ago

Just make something good and useful and don’t kill it and you will be exceeding Google in so many areas. Think marathon, not sprint.

PerryCox• 7 years ago

Yeah this is a good point, if you have a product with good support, that's one way you can out compete them.

cpv• 7 years ago

" Think marathon, not sprint."

I've seen this before as "Think long-term, not short-term". Sometimes it can be true.

notyourday• 7 years ago

Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive?

they certainly do aggressively shutdown the products.

I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying?

Every second you are worrying about what Google is doing rather than continuing to work on whatever you are working on is the second you are wasting.

adventured• 7 years ago

Google isn't doing anything new + interesting at all.

I consider Google to be one of the giants that are entirely irrelevant in competitive terms. They almost comically stay in their lane: search, YouTube, search, Gmail, search, search, ads, search, Android, search, search, Google Cloud, search. Every ten years or so maybe they'll add something.

I consider Google to be a company that never has to be considered when I'm thinking about building something.

I have no plans to launch my own massive operating system (what small team is going to do that anyway). I have no interest in doing a common search engine. Competing in the streaming space with YouTube, Netflix, & Co. is a nightmare of licensing & rights problems (and it's very saturated). The last thing I'd ever want to do is run an email service (thankful for those that do it well). AWS, Azure, and 37 other cloud service providers already exist, no need to reinvent that wheel and compete with Google Cloud (they're not the most competitive there anyway).

Google search is 21 years old. Gmail is 15 years old. YouTube is 14-15 years old. Android is 11 years old. Google is gray.

So what else is there? That just leaves 99% of everything else that I never, ever have to worry about Google competing seriously in.

xiphias2• 7 years ago

Of course every mature product has is more than 10 years old: it takes 10 years to get to a point when the product itself is mature.

Google is the first company that started to spend money on productionize self driving technology. It takes time to get to market, because the problem is super hard.

If you want something newer that probably won't go away any time soon, Tensorflow is a few years old, and TPUs are also just a few years old. Google has many of the best and biggest number of AI researchers, and it's not shy to use the AI infrastructure in production.

sweeneyrod• 7 years ago

Google isn't doing anything new + interesting at all. If they're not, what large company is?

ok_coo• 7 years ago

People once felt the same way about Microsoft. There’s ways to be competitive with Google for whatever you’re interested in. You can compete by having good customer service for your product. They’ve given that up to the algos.

I know I personally highly value the ability to talk to an actual human if I’m having a problem.

close04• 7 years ago

As any sector matures it becomes harder and harder to truly "disrupt" (not talking about "fake disrupt" by being better because you take shortcuts even if it breaks the law). You see it in many other sectors, consolidation is key. Standing out, while not impossible, is improbable. This is not meant to discourage people from trying, you never know until you do.

But if big IT has learned their lesson they won't wait until you're too big to run you over. It's why everyone is on acquisition sprees these days, or simply incorporate tech and ideas into their products and use their sheer market share to drown smaller competitors they borrowed the idea from.

A niche may be different since no company can cover everything. But it's still uncertain when they choose to go there and go head to head with you. Google didn't overtake MS by playing in a niche. So I guess it depends on what your targets are.

TX-i• 7 years ago

Once felt the same way? Microsoft owns GitHub and part of the unix kernal now. Competition only exists to become assets to these companies.

tozeur• 7 years ago

They’ve always been aggressively competitive. You don’t become a 700B company playing nice

VikingCoder• 7 years ago

The cost to move atoms and bits everywhere in the world is near zero.

This means that you could be the best in your field for hundreds of miles around, but your neighbors might still go on Amazon and order a product manufactured in China.

I worry about this.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

It works both ways.

Find or invent a tiny niche and be among the best in the world in it, and the whole world (including China) will come to you for it.

erikpukinskis2• 7 years ago

Every company has things they structurally cannot do well. Google scales? They can’t do customer service. Facebook has all the network effects? They can’t iterate rapidly. Tesla has the best electric cars? They can’t sell nostalgia.

That’s why people tell you to “be yourself”. It’s a rough proxy for “don’t be other people” which is a rough proxy for “don’t be something someone else is already succeeding at.”

But also, if you are really enamored of Google, maybe that means you should work towards getting hired there!

skrebbel• 7 years ago

I'm a startup founder, and I've never understood this worry.

I know of scary few products by Google (or one of the other tech bigcos) that successfully wiped out an up-and-coming startup.

They did acquire quite a bunch, but can you name a successful Google product that killed a startup without acquiring it? I'm sure there are some but it can't be much. Docs, Android, Firebase, Maps all came out of acquisitions.

I mean, sure, they're super competitive, but my impression is that that competitiveness is mostly targeted at Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. I mean GCP is mostly just Google reimplementing the most popular AWS products with less cruft. That's super competitive but I'm curious how it threatens your one man business.

curious_fella1• 7 years ago

Was gmail made in house?

cameronbrown3• 7 years ago

Without Google's resources Android, Maps, YouTube, DoubleClick and the like wouldn't be the powerhouses they are today. Take that how you will, good or bad.

amos19870630• 7 years ago

These data centers will collect large amounts of personal data. I believe that the future of personal privacy protection issues needs to receive greater attention.

jasonvorhe2• 7 years ago

This is not on topic.

spookthesunset• 7 years ago

These “omg privacy!” flavor of off topic post seems predictably standard for anything with “google” in the title.

auslander2• 7 years ago

Why not? Ad company wasting energy to run ad business. Nothing "clean" about it.

nabla92• 7 years ago

The Hamina data center is close to Russia without being in Russia. I guess it's the closest Google is comfortable at being when serving Russian customers.

In the north data centers can double as heating power plants when coupled with district heating. It's unfortunate that Google puts the excess heat into the sea. Yandex has a big data center in Mäntsälä. Their cooling water is used for heating the area. There are also data centers in Helsinki where heat is used in district heating.

davedx• 7 years ago

Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings.

Great to hear this is being put into action. Computing -> heat.

bigbaguette• 7 years ago

Following this logic, I often thought electric heaters are a waste of energy since they perform no computation.

But a French company is having a go at this: https://www.qarnot.com/computing-heater_qh-1/

ryanmercer• 7 years ago

Hah that's amazing. I remember when I did bitcoin mining (only 1 GPU) and thinking it was getting noticeably warmer upstairs in our house, and how actually the bigger miners could use the heat to heat buildings.

I switched to a Chromebox as my daily driver 2 years and change ago because my bedroom would be about 1F higher than the other rooms at idle and I saw it 11F hotter one time after several hours of one of the BattleField titles running dual GPUs.

The added benefit is, even with the PC running at idle 24/7 the Chromebox would have paid for itself right around the 2 year mark in energy savings at a full load.

rypskar• 7 years ago

This is one of the reasons why I only run BOINC on CPUs during summer and on GPUs and CPUs the rest of the year. My 10 year old i7 have been running 100% mostly 24/7 for 10 years with no problem, while 2-3 graphics cards have given because of the heat

bduerst• 7 years ago

That's reportedly how someone gave themselves permanent brain damage by mining bitcoins in their bedroom:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-minor-bitcoin-miner-injury/

ineedasername6• 7 years ago

I remember being able to mine on a single Nvidia GPU on my laptop, significantly less efficient than an AMD one (at least at the time) and giving it up as pointless when it only generated a single bitcoin in a week. And then a year or so later being thrilled when I read an article that the price skyrocketed to $200 and I remembered that one coin, and sold it. Oh well!

Strom• 7 years ago

It is amusing how in their goal to be carbon neutral they're just heating the sea directly, cutting out the atmosphere as a middle-man. I'm not sure what the numbers on it are though. I guess heating the sea will only be once but having CO in the atmosphere will provide recurring heating.

CobrastanJorji2• 7 years ago

I imagine it's the difference between using the oven in your home and installing insulation. The oven does directly heat your home a bit, and the insulation does not, but the insulation will have a much bigger impact.

05• 7 years ago

I guess it's the closest Google is comfortable at being when serving Russian customers.

Guess again (TLDR: Law requires Internet companies to store Russians’ personal data within country’s borders ) https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-moves-some-servers-to-ru...

nabla92• 7 years ago

Google stores that data in Rostelecom's data center to comply with the law.

badrequest2• 7 years ago

At Google Next in April, I attended a talk by the C-level in charge of Google's Datacenters, and they bragged about using machine learning to manage/anticipate their power draw, and the subsequent efficiencies those brought. They also bragged about how much they're trying to make these centers powered by renewables.

When an audience member asked if they would be releasing their models that help them manage power, the speaker quickly changed the topic, which I felt told me all I needed to know about the sincerity of their motivations.

Jyaif2• 7 years ago

You think you can drop a model into a new data center with a different architecture, different censors, different workloads, and it will magically save energy?

badrequest2• 7 years ago

That is a fair point, though I still think if your genuine motivation was the well-being of the Earth, then you'd, I dunno, _try?_

Barrin92• 7 years ago

even if they didn't, seeing the limits of those models in different environments would certainly help the community overall, and if it saves a tenth of the energy it does for Google somewhere else it would be an enormous immediate reduction in energy consumption on a global scale, so it's hard to see what the downside would be.

If one was truly concerned about 'democratizing AI', as companies like Google so often claim, then sharing access to the trained models would arguably be far more effective than just sharing research papers which many companies don't even know how to implement. In fact the large majority of companies that are responsible for energy consumption don't have any data on the scale that Google has, so I would go as far as call this a bad faith deflection from the beginning.

modeless• 7 years ago

The trained models are likely not directly applicable to any other company's data centers. Instead, Google publishes machine learning research. Open access so that everyone can benefit. Here's a paper on Deepmind's reinforcement learning system for datacenter cooling: https://deepmind.com/research/publications/safe-exploration-...

mav3rick• 7 years ago

They could have saved Earth and you would find a fault. This is a great initiative, but you're criticizing about not "open sourcing" it. Google open sources plenty of things. The solution maybe heavily coupled to their infrastructure.

dmix• 7 years ago

And who knows it was probably out of the scope of the presentation and he simply didn't know if they had any plans to publish research or directly open source it.

I doubt Google's being super protective of data center power optimization stuff. Demand optimization sounds like a relatively straightforward software problem for Amazon, Microsoft, etc to solve. Most of the utility would be for the smaller players.

bt8483• 7 years ago

Google’s datacenter power management relies on software features that nobody outside Google is prepared to accept. Most operators expect to have thermal headroom for short CPU clock rate bursts and they don’t want some central daemon downclocking their machines. From what I’ve seen outside Google, most organizations would get much more benefit from focusing on utilization than trying to replicate Google fan speed control techniques. If you still have UPSs and dual AC-DC power supplies in every box and your PUE is 2.0 you don’t need the thing that allowed Google to go from 1.11 to 1.10.

dxbydt• 7 years ago

I did a bunch of work on managing/anticipating the power draw. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747481 ). Something nobody talks about is how grossly wasteful & inefficient Hadoop is. There's a bunch of cited papers (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58... ) that study power consumption of Hadoop nodes, but nothing on how to actually reduce the consumption.

So here's something you can personally do to make a dent to this problem. Most of the Hadoop jobs that you write will involve some statistical summary over a dataset. Find the total, or the mean, median, 90th quantile, whatever. Writing a Hadoop map-reduce job is the single worst way to do this.Almost always, you can sample say a 1000 points, get a kernel density estimate via Parzen & then use a table. All quantiles, order statistics, functions of order stats...these can be hand computed for several univariate distributions & their location-scale families, and your real-life data can easily be bounded above below by these estimates. So you can get to > 95% accuracy just by hand-calculating. I can go into details if you like, but I suspect most of you already know how to do this.

opportune• 7 years ago

Another way to get huge efficiency gains over using Hadoop is to intelligently memoize results and compute as-you-go. But that requires making some bespoke architecture. However I contend that at any scale where it actually makes sense to use Hadoop (especially in the cloud era), it will be cheaper in the medium-term of 1 year or so to dedicate developer time to make something more efficient than a big daily pipeline of Hadoop jobs

smueller1234• 7 years ago

You're exactly right. Hadoop and it's ecosystem are... a very poor replica of the system whose predecessor the respective Google papers were written about. There's glaring efficiency things like not supporting complex encodings (last I used HDFS, at least, it could only do full replication) or the query engines on top not implementing sampling in their aggregates as a default/out of the box, which the Google tools do.

lclarkmichalek• 7 years ago

The good news is that barely anyone at FAANG scale is using Hadoop any more

eitally• 7 years ago

The models in isolation aren't useful. The knowledge to create models like them is where the value lies, but it's only possible to generate value if you can do this in a way that is broadly applicable... which is where building systems management partnerships come into play.

Yes, you can argue the point you made, but it's not particularly insightful because the specific IP employed to govern power mgmt at Google DCs is only truly applicable to Google DCs.

GhettoMaestro• 7 years ago

Release of source-code and licensing of said code is typically a very significant consideration for a company like Google.

Even a "C-level" person in the singular sense most likely does not have the authority to approve such a thing. And if you don't have approval, you probably shouldn't talk or speculate about it in a public forum.

Don't hate the player. Hate the legal-liability game.

chvid• 7 years ago

Will these data centers still be subject to mass data collection by the us government (under arrangements similar to the prism program described in the Snowden relevations)? Does it matter at all that these centers are placed outside the us?

andrerm• 7 years ago

Google is a US corporation. It doesn't matters

bt8483• 7 years ago

Just like basically this biggest nit ever, but Snowden revelations didn't reveal anything and nothing was described in them. Snowden exfiltrated a bunch of powerpoints that neither he nor you nor I can understand out of context. The most supportable conclusion you can really glean from Snowden's slide decks is the US intelligence agencies were able to intercept traffic of undersea cables.

1-6• 7 years ago

Fiber is encrypted you know...

rabscuttler• 7 years ago

Bravo to Google for this show of corporate leadership. Their pledge to purchase renewable energy to match their real-time demand really is impressive, especially the note that it must create new renewable generation (discussed on the Google blog announcement not this article) .

It is also prudent, as these long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with new renewable generators will be very competitive, probably much cheaper than wholesale power prices, and be fixed into the future, avoiding price fluctuations from e.g. future gas supply shocks.

cameronbrown3• 7 years ago

I wonder, would it be feasible for them to use wind power to run time insensitive batch jobs in the daytime - crank down the processing power on these jobs when there's less green energy around?

cheez• 7 years ago

Google has insane optimization for power consumption at data centers, if there is something you can think of, they will have either done it or will be trying it.

ses1984• 7 years ago

I wonder if preemptible instances could be priced or available this way. They could choose to run idle or contract in case of expensive or dirty power.

enneff• 7 years ago

A big challenge for Google, and any large DC operators in general, is utilization. Ideally you want the entire fleet working at 100% all the time, so there's no real benefit to ramping up or down with energy supply.

paulddraper• 7 years ago

Not impossible, but I doubt it.

(1) Existing power usage doesn't work that way. You're basically on the hook for a predicable amount of usage. Of course, this could change, but the inertia behind this paradigm is high.

(2) Google has a bunch of hardware with relatively fixed costs that they'd prefer to run 24 hrs/day, 365 days/year.

jsingleton• 7 years ago

Google deservedly get the best rating in this cloud whitepaper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eCCb3rgqtQxcRwLdTr0P_hCK...

Ahead of Azure and way ahead of AWS/Oracle/IBM.

ineedasername6• 7 years ago

avoiding price fluctuations from e.g. future gas supply shocks.

Yes, especially in Europe where the dominant natural gas supplier, Russia, has shown itself more than willing to use their position as a political hammer. And I know, that's not just a Russia issue, other countries do the same, they're just the most applicable when talking about gas in Europe.

rndgermandude4• 7 years ago

They might be (a lot) less bad than other data centers, but unless these google data centers have a neutral carbon footprint, they are not clean, and unless they have a negative footprint they are not "environmentally friendly".

jonas212• 7 years ago

Google's datacenters are already carbon neutral. This is about going one step further and using locally-generated renewable energy to power the datacenters.

rndgermandude4• 7 years ago

No they are not. They use energy, a lot of it. They want to run their data centers off of renewable, "carbon-free" energy sources and made some great strides towards that. But they aren't there yet.

On top of that, renewables aren't carbon neutral per se, either. And the hardware you put into those things isn't free either.

Now you might argue the services google is able to provide with them warrant the environmental costs, but that's another question entirely. And you might argue that google did a lot of things to reduce their footprint (and they did) but it's hardly close to zero, let alone negative.

alexis_fr• 7 years ago

As long as there are always more humans on this planet, we will have to serve them. Factories, food, electricity can’t be decreased if every decrease per person is followed by an increase in headcounts, which is what’s happening of all western countries since we invented ecology.

In other words, do you have a plan for decreasing actual footprint without having it followed by: “Hey guys, we can afford increasing our population!”

rndgermandude4• 7 years ago

As long as there are always more humans on this planet, we will have to serve them.

Sure, tho youtube cat videos are not a basic need in my humble opinion, and neither is tracking my every digital move so you can sell me to advertisers.

Factories, food, electricity can’t be decreased if every decrease per person is followed by an increase in headcounts

Well, food demand will increase, but can we and the comparatively fragile system that is our planet afford that people eat a big chunk of cow every day? How about a big chunk of cow every few days instead?

We can actually decrease factories or rather their ecological footprint, and we can use less electricity (a new fridge uses less electricity than an old fridge, and there is technological advancement to be had, and a lot of low hanging fruits still) and we can can produce energy with less pollution. And we can plant some fucking trees. And then even cut down those trees and bury them in the ground, putting back some of the carbon we took out before. And regulate polluters into oblivion.

A lot of changes would be "hard", like taking away people's daily burgers, and punishing corporate polluters. So they probably will not happen because politicians are chicken shits, scared they will be voted out of office if the price of meat goes up, or some coal mine closes and loses some jobs. But we can at least regulatory incentivize good behavior and better products.

But yeah, my plan would also include tackling the population issue as a major part of it. Not in a "one child" Chinese way, of course, but I'd strongly deincentivize having many children, starting with no more tax breaks/credits after birth two and creating harsh prison sentences for people who are not willing to pay their child support (which is different to not being able to pay, of course), but also investing heavily in making access to free contraceptives and education about contraceptives available to everybody. But sadly there are far too many evil morons running around preaching abstinence-only, because their imaginary friend in the Heavens doesn't like the feel of latex on the skin or something.

And a lot more out there, I'd also invade the Vatican and try the pope and his flunkies for crimes against humanity. If we can put Serbs and African "leaders" on trial, we should be able to do the same to the pope.

ashildr• 7 years ago

Not in the UK I guess...

cedivad• 7 years ago

Oh, so that's what those Google job listings for datacenter-builders were for...

m0zg• 7 years ago

What'd be better for the environment is to not build anything at all, and force people to use existing resources more efficiently through higher pricing rather than buying more resources to run at 1/30th the speed a real programming language would be able to do. Not a realistic proposition, but let's not get taken by the narrative that a multi-megawatt datacenter can somehow be as green as they claim, once you consider the downstream effects.

auslander2• 7 years ago

I wonder what has bigger impact on climate, driving a car daily or feeding Google and Adtech industry with all your data, that has to be stored and constantly processed.

toper-centage• 7 years ago

Did you know [Ecosia] (www.ecosia.org) is carbon negative? Google should follow suit if they really care.

Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe

Related Stories