Post #3740059

2026-07-03 14:40 UTC

I've a #Question for the masses, and would appreciate if others would boost this. Its about #Datacenters #Green #Agrotech and #rural #Fiber #Internet We all know the story of hyperscalers. Slyly buy property, move in, destroy local area, increase electricity by a lot, drain aquifers, horrible noise and light pollution. I'm instead looking at a triad of the following: 5000-6000 sqft data center in smaller communities. Find industrial or decrepit land and respectfully develop. Heavy acoustic paneling. Geothermal cooling loop to eliminate almost all water use. Power completely offset by local solar. Virtual Power Plants. I pair with local (to the datacenter) farmers raising cows and/or sheep. I work WITH a few of them and install on their land raised solar panels and a battery room. They get 'discounted' (read: free) green power, and a seat at the table to the local operations. Will also work with local incumbent power companies to pay for grid upgrades, so the public doesn't have to. With local data centers and rented dark fiber allows building out a fiber ISP. Its more a secondary, however building rural fiber can greatly improve and upgrade a community. This also can serve as a backbone for more #Agritech like drone coordination, farm #IoT integration with FLOSS technologies. If I talked with local governing boards, and had multiple open sessions for the public, would you tentatively support this Green Distributed Edge Compute and Infrastructure ecosystem? The final goal would be to replicate this model across the USA, strengthening the power grid, increasing fiber access for rural and semirural communities, and providing a distributed mesh of compute so that you are no further than 5-10 ms away from local powerful compute.

Replies (1)

@cazabon@mindly.social 2026-07-11 04:12

@crankylinuxuser@infosec.exchange There's no such thing as a 5-6,000 sqft datacenter [1], and I'm not sure they can practically / cost-effectively scale down that far. Datacenters have large fixed costs: land, usually new utility connections, redundant power feeds, generators and batteries, redundant fiber connections, lots and lots of legal and administrative work like negotiating all the above before they reach byte 1, etc. Some of those scale directly with the size of the resulting datacenter, but others don't scale at all, or only partially scale, so they're proportionally more expensive for a smaller facility. A small datacenter is probably 100,000 sqft these days. I can't see them getting much smaller than that. As others have noted, datacenters also have nothing to do with providing internet service to the community they're in. That's a separate business. [1] Unless you count things like "this company has one floor for its server room" and call that a datacenter.

Open ##3740058