The more I think about it, the less sense this graphic has
- If not per sq km, it should at least be per capita
just checking on wikipedia, divided by area GB should have bar around twice high as Germany. 209k m^2 vs 357k m^2 - and what does it mean 1 datacenter in the first place?
big as a city sprawling datacenter complex and a bunch of racks in the cellar both count as 1?
If you follow the trail you get Cloudscene as a source: https://cloudscene.com/region/datacenters-in-north-america
They seem to be some cloud services marketplaces, where they link up buyers and sellers. I suspect it only lists the data centers that they have listed that are included in the graphic. That would make a lot of sense, since Chinese data centers used to service people in China are unlikely to be listed, which is why it says in all of China there are only 300 data centers.
Personally I think it’d be interesting to see this per capita, so here’s my back of a napkin math for data centers per 1 million pop (c. 2022):
- NL - 16.78
- US - 16.15
- AU - 11.72
- CA - 8.63
- GB - 7.68
- DE - 6.22
- FR - 4.63
- JP - 1.75
- RU - 1.74
- CN - 0.32
Worth noting of course that this only lists the quantity of discrete data centers and says nothing about the capacity of those data centers. I think it’d be really interesting to break down total compute power and total storage by country and by population.
I’d also be interested to know what qualifies as a “data center”? For example, are ASIC based crypto mining operations counted, even though their machinery cannot be repurposed to any other function? That would certainly account for a chunk of the the US (almost all of it in Texas).
Yeah, that’s the proper way to think about it. And honestly, it should be servers or racks per capita (i.e. some standard unit), not just “datacenters,” since those can be of varying size.
I would really want a measure of actual compute power, like teraflops per capita or something. Still imperfect, but better than just counting the number of buildings.
Yeah, almost any metric is more useful than this one, and I’m an American who “benefits” from this stat.
OK, interesting. I’m a little unclear on how they’re calculating rMax and rPeak though?
Rpeak values are calculated using the advertised clock rate of the CPU. For the efficiency of the systems you should take into account the Turbo CPU clock rate where it applies
I’m gonna speculate, but I don’t think these systems can run all cpu cores on turbo due to power and thermal limitations and because that wouldn’t be good cost/processing power wise (since you need excessive cooling to do that). Rather, they fire turbo on groups of CPUs, allowing the CPUs to cool down till the sequence wraps around
So, I think rPeak is the processing power achieved when the computer is turboing a large chunk of CPUs
Sorry for my messy writing, I’m a little tired
Surprised that Ireland isn’t on this list. Surely they need loads of data centres for all the US companies they shield from taxes 😉.
Germany only 521? Seems a bit low.
What counts as a “data center”? How many rooms and how many racks does it need to have?
I believe it needs to be a building that is only dedicated to servers.
Not an office building or factory with a server room attached.
In 2020 there have been around 3000 data centers in Germany. Sounds more plausible to me.
Surprised china has few
If you follow the source trail it lists Cloudscene as the source, who seem to be some marketplace for buying and selling cloud services. I highly suspect it’s a count of the data centers they have listed by their sellers, which would bias the US and explain why there are so few for China.
