7 ms·

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

pgwhalen 3y ago
I have zero evidence, but this seems extremely unlikely. Do you have more than zero evidence?
- meiraleal 3y ago
  Meta can use all their datacenter space while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft datacenter space is mostly rented.
dsp 3y ago
[citation needed]
jedberg 3y 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 3y ago
  You can just map them all... I have. I also worked at AWS :)
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    This would be an interesting dataset to use for trading decisions (or sell to hedge funds). But I wonder how much of their infrastructure is publicly mappable, compared to just the part of it that's exposed to the edge. (Can you map some internal instances in a VPC?) That said, I'm sure there are a lot of side channels in the provisioning APIs, certificate logs, and other metadata that could paint a decently accurate picture of cloud sizes. It might not cover everything but it'd be good enough to track and measure a gradual expansion of capacity.
    - virtuallynathan 3y ago
      I’m not sure mapping VPCs is super helpful - the physical infra is fairly distinct. AWS has also disclosed 20 million Nitro adapters have been deployed, so you can do some backwards napkin math from that.
  - the-rc 3y ago
    Mapping as in.. drawing the outlines of buildings and computing the square footage yourself?
    - virtuallynathan 3y ago
      Yep.
      - the-rc 3y ago
        Then you should be aware that, for the longest time, Google was against multiple floors, until they suddenly switched to four floors in many locations: https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431213/scaling-up-google-building-four-story-data-centers https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431213/sc... A decade ago, there was a burst in construction and in some places the bottleneck was not getting the machines or electricity, but how fast they could deliver and pour cement, even working overnight.
        virtuallynathan 3y ago
        Yep, I am aware, I have a square footage multiplier for their multi-story buildings.
        jedberg 3y ago
        But how can you know how many floors they have? And where are you getting the list of buildings from? And what makes you think your list is complete? Also how do you know their efficiency? Google might have less space but also a way to pack twice as much compute in the same place. Like I said, this is impossible to know without a lot of insider information from a lot of companies.
        virtuallynathan 3y ago
        Well, they tell you for one: https://datacenterpost.com/scaling-up-google-building-four-story-data-centers/ https://datacenterpost.com/scaling-up-google-building-four-s... We also have Google Street view, etc. Of course, it's all estimates. You can get fancier and count generators and transformers and stuff too.
karmasimida 3y ago
I don't think so, AWS hasn't disclosed this numbers, like datacenter spaces occupied, so how do you know.
- virtuallynathan 3y ago
  I have mapped every AWS data center globally, and I worked at AWS. Facebook publishes this data.
virtuallynathan 3y 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.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  But Google built data centers aren't the only data centers google is running their machine fleet in...
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    Yeah, Google buys servers in public datacenters like those from Equinix. One "region" needn't be one datacenter, and sometimes AWS and GCP will even have computers in the same facility. It's actually quite annoying that "region" is such an opaque construct and they don't have any clear way to identify what physical building is hosting the hardware you rent from them.
    - the-rc 3y ago
      Those are almost lost in the noise, compared to the big datacenters. (I've been inside two Atlanta facilities, one leased and one built from scratch, and the old Savvis one in Sunnyvale).
- samstave 3y 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?

pgwhalen 3y ago

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

meiraleal 3y ago
Meta can use all their datacenter space while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft datacenter space is mostly rented.

dsp 3y ago

[citation needed]

jedberg 3y 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 3y ago
You can just map them all... I have. I also worked at AWS :)
- chatmasta 3y ago
  This would be an interesting dataset to use for trading decisions (or sell to hedge funds). But I wonder how much of their infrastructure is publicly mappable, compared to just the part of it that's exposed to the edge. (Can you map some internal instances in a VPC?) That said, I'm sure there are a lot of side channels in the provisioning APIs, certificate logs, and other metadata that could paint a decently accurate picture of cloud sizes. It might not cover everything but it'd be good enough to track and measure a gradual expansion of capacity.
  - virtuallynathan 3y ago
    I’m not sure mapping VPCs is super helpful - the physical infra is fairly distinct. AWS has also disclosed 20 million Nitro adapters have been deployed, so you can do some backwards napkin math from that.
- the-rc 3y ago
  Mapping as in.. drawing the outlines of buildings and computing the square footage yourself?
  - virtuallynathan 3y ago
    Yep.
    - the-rc 3y ago
      Then you should be aware that, for the longest time, Google was against multiple floors, until they suddenly switched to four floors in many locations: https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431213/scaling-up-google-building-four-story-data-centers https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431213/sc... A decade ago, there was a burst in construction and in some places the bottleneck was not getting the machines or electricity, but how fast they could deliver and pour cement, even working overnight.
      - virtuallynathan 3y ago
        Yep, I am aware, I have a square footage multiplier for their multi-story buildings.
        jedberg 3y ago
        But how can you know how many floors they have? And where are you getting the list of buildings from? And what makes you think your list is complete? Also how do you know their efficiency? Google might have less space but also a way to pack twice as much compute in the same place. Like I said, this is impossible to know without a lot of insider information from a lot of companies.
        virtuallynathan 3y ago
        Well, they tell you for one: https://datacenterpost.com/scaling-up-google-building-four-story-data-centers/ https://datacenterpost.com/scaling-up-google-building-four-s... We also have Google Street view, etc. Of course, it's all estimates. You can get fancier and count generators and transformers and stuff too.

karmasimida 3y ago

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

virtuallynathan 3y ago
I have mapped every AWS data center globally, and I worked at AWS. Facebook publishes this data.

virtuallynathan 3y 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.

VirusNewbie 3y ago
But Google built data centers aren't the only data centers google is running their machine fleet in...
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Yeah, Google buys servers in public datacenters like those from Equinix. One "region" needn't be one datacenter, and sometimes AWS and GCP will even have computers in the same facility. It's actually quite annoying that "region" is such an opaque construct and they don't have any clear way to identify what physical building is hosting the hardware you rent from them.
  - the-rc 3y ago
    Those are almost lost in the noise, compared to the big datacenters. (I've been inside two Atlanta facilities, one leased and one built from scratch, and the old Savvis one in Sunnyvale).
samstave 3y 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?