The Netherlands are one of the most densely settled areas in Europe and particularly prone to floods. Better to build a datacenter somewhere in Germany or France's rural regions - the real estate is cheaper.
> Better to build a data-center somewhere in Germany or France
Hey hey, don't give them ideas. We don't want them here.
Plus, given current European energy struggles, when Germany considers rationing power delivery, deploying Facebook space heaters sucking 200MW is not only irresponsible, but should be criminal.
The datacenter in question was going to deliver residual heat to the community. Not really sure how well that works with a datacenter given the relatively low temperature exhaust air but yeah, you jest, but that was apparently the plan.
That only works if the datacenter is built somewhere near residential units, and real estate that is near residential units is usually too expensive to build a large datacenter.
I'm no energy engineer so I'm just going off what I randomly know: in Iceland they transport ~80°C water from a power plant off in the mountains (okay that makes it sound further than it really is) to Reykjavík and it loses only a few degrees along the way. Used for residential heating, hot water (it's potable but smells bad so they use heat exchangers), and even street heating against sleet. The distance is something like thirty minutes of driving on the highway if I remember correctly, so like 30km?
While I see your point in general, also because servers are not typically put in oil or anything so this would be hot air (much less dense than water), I wonder if it's as simple as that. It's not like the Netherlands has spots where you are further than a handful of kilometers from the nearest buildings and, often, towns.
Yes the Netherlands is dense, but a vast majority of it is still open space. You can see by just looking at a satellite view of Zeewolde. It's almost entirely farmland.
How big do you think these data centers are? There are ~80 square miles of farmland in Zeewolde. The largest data center in the world would take up less than .1% of that space.
On top of that, the farmland isn't necessarily even growing food. They may be growing, say, tulips.
Netherlands is only behind US in agricultural export because of those open spaces. Of course there's money to be made and latency improvement would be great for EU but if the usage of the land takes more from the locals and the peoples of importer countries than it gives then it's not worth it. Company being FB seems to be just making this argument stronger.
