49 pointsby andsoitis5 hours ago8 comments
  • ImJasonH4 hours ago
    When I was at Google I built https://gcping.com/ for fun to measure latency to each cloud region. I'm honestly surprised it's still up!
    • hmokiguess3 hours ago
      Why surprised?
      • asdff3 hours ago
        Useful working tools tend to get sunset by google before long. Google earth pro is getting killed this January, get your downloads in.
  • hollow-moe4 hours ago
    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)
    • moofin_men3 hours ago
      What kind of tech? Lots of it gets contracted out, there's not that much full time staff at any given facility.

      I used to travel installing Optical Networking equipment, there's definitely demand there but it's brutal travel.

      You could look into the big 3rd party providers Equinix, Digital Realty, etc, they often have some openings. The main thing to consider is they have some pretty crazy shift schedules. Lots of them 12 hours 3-4 days a week with nights etc.

    • cavemandaveman4 hours ago
      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.
    • trimethylpurine3 hours ago
      You're fishing in a small pond with few fish. It doesn't take many people to run a DC.
    • bayarearefugee4 hours ago
      > 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.

      • cavemandaveman3 hours ago
        Are you sure? Microsoft hired about 500 full time employees for its first data center in Wisconsin.

        https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-hired-375-people-for-moun...

        • crote2 hours ago
          Construction jobs. Those will only stay around as long as Microsoft keeps churning out additional datacenters in that local area.
          • cavemandaveman2 hours ago
            Those aren't construction jobs. They're for the finished data center.
        • trimethylpurine3 hours ago
          And most of them will be on unemployment or working on another location pretty soon.
      • walrus013 hours ago
        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.
        • asdff3 hours ago
          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.
  • 4 hours ago
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  • sxp3 hours ago
    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
    • zeroxfe3 hours ago
      The page seems to be pretty clear that these are datacenters "owned and operated" by Google. They're not redefining "datacenter." The caches and edge PoPs are typically rented racks in partner datacenters, usually telcos and ISPs.
    • Barbing3 hours ago
      Edge node map didn’t get archived I see: https://web.archive.org/web/20170106184020/https://peering.g...

      But “…Google has placed more than 7,500 edge nodes, which are Google servers installed in the networks of Internet service and network providers.” https://web.archive.org/web/20250722030821/https://spectrum....

    • danpalmer3 hours ago
      This page isn't new, it's just marketing for a different purpose. This one is about "owned and operated" data centers, as this is basically a careers page. The cloud page is marketing for another purpose – cloud customers. Is there really any lying going on here?
  • mlh4964 hours ago
    Interesting. Not a single data center in California.
    • cavemandaveman4 hours ago
      Cost prohibitive?
      • asdff3 hours ago
        It is all about power costs. Tennessee for example seems like a weird place to put a datacenter, until you read about the TVA.
      • jeffbee4 hours ago
        Not enough people to serve.
  • gradus_ad4 hours ago
    Surprised at how few there are...
    • kevin_nisbet4 hours ago
      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.
    • johannes12343214 hours ago
      I assume that's only their own data centers, not where they rent space in other data centers.
    • BadBadJellyBean4 hours ago
      And none of the on the continents of Africa or Australia.
      • btmiller3 hours ago
        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!
      • shric3 hours ago
        They have a cloud presence in Sydney for example. They just presumably don’t own the DC because it’s too small to be worth building their own
      • jeffbee4 hours ago
        Nobody lives there. Ten times more people live in Indonesia.
        • andsoitis4 hours ago
          >> Africa

          > Nobody lives there

          Africa has just under 20% of the world's population.

          • jeffbee4 hours ago
            I was pretty obviously responding to the Australia part.
        • charlieyu13 hours ago
          Is population actually an issue? The cost may well be cheaper
  • lijok3 hours ago
    Astonished they disclosed this. Even more astonished how few there are.

    How many of these would have to get destroyed for them to go out of business?

  • jharohit5 hours ago
    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
    • 3eb7988a16634 hours ago
      Surely anyone with an interest could find this through various means.

      Also easily found potential military targets: power generation, water treatment, hospitals, schools, government buildings, etc.

    • 0xcafefood5 hours ago
      Is it actually possible to hide the locations of datacenters? At least large ones?
      • cowlevel3 hours ago
        Yes. They are not trivial to distinguish from other large industrial buildings. If you know a building is one, you still don't know whose.
        • shadowgovt3 hours ago
          It's local public knowledge. The buildings are registered with the county they're in and pay taxes. In the US at least, that's public info.

          Odds of data centers being physically attacked at scale are low. Most of the population doesn't care enough, and the vocal minority is under a lot of scrutiny.

        • crote2 hours ago
          Except from the massive power hookup, all the cooling equipment, and the emergency generators, of course.

          You can hide a handful of racks for some boring 2000s hosting. You can't hide a GW-scale AI behemoth.

    • walrus013 hours ago
      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.
    • andsoitis5 hours ago
      > not really sure its a wise choice to disclose datacenters anymore publicly.

      Transparency is good.

      • cowlevel3 hours ago
        Think they're referring to the recent drone/datacenter velocity exchanges in Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East.
        • shadowgovt3 hours ago
          Those countries are actively engaged in wars.

          If the US ends up in a similar asymmetric warfare scenario, the location of corporate data centers being known is low on the priority list. Google is assuming a peacetime footing where public transparency and accountability matter.

          • thunky32 minutes ago
            > Those countries are actively engaged in wars

            So is the US.

    • iAMkenough4 hours ago
      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.
      • IncreasePosts4 hours ago
        There's also probably 100k people at Google who can see where all their data centers are, and it just takes one to tell someone else
        • shadowgovt3 hours ago
          Correct. The internal maps are quite thorough and detailed. At least they were.