Datacentres are near cities because
- The good comms are already there
- investors and media need a destination worth visiting, or it won't get built
- there needs to be a nice restaurant nearby to go to after the ribbon-cutting ceremony

A modern datacenter is a capital-raising vehicle

If your social media profile was established 18 years ago, is it still subject to proving age>16 ?

AI is not latency-sensitive like earlier Datacentre applications, it can run anywhere on the planet and the result is the same to the end user. Yet still nobody builds AI in South Australia where energy is mostly renewables - there is a new 4MW facility in Findon that has been empty for 3 years

You may not have noticed yet that Australians rarely validate credentials in job applications. Parents who push their kids to get tech certifications often pay for training, so a cornered child might ile about passing the exam, and then have to maintain the lie when their family find them a job

Nice, that is the set made from plant-based plastic

I setup demand-response for a Datacentre in WA. For most data centres, this means running on the on-site diesel generators for an hour or so. The power load doesn't go away, and because the gensets are usually for emergencies only nobody is counting carbon emissions

The paper mills in Albury consumed about 730,000 MWh annually before they shut down in 2019, one of Australia's biggest energy users. My Dad grew up in Burnie where the sea was orange with runoff dumped from the paper mill, amusing to see paper framed as a lesser evil www.aemc.gov.au/sites/defaul...

I worked at a corporate who outsourced Australian fleet management to the Phillipines and incentivised those offshore workers to save money. Hilarity ensued, often in the form of fines for non-registration

When the first fibre-optic cables were deployed in Australia during the 80's, something in the manufacturing process left a residue on the cable that smelled like Wombat pheromones. Randy marsupials would dig up the cables and cause outages that had never happened with copper lines