Why Do Cloud Titans Keep Building Datacenters In America's Hottest City?
The Register, Friday, July 21,2023
100 days over 100F and historic drought don't faze Microsoft or Google. With more than a hundred 100F (37.7C) days a year and a persistent drought, on paper Phoenix, Arizona is one of the last places you'd expect to find cloud and colocation providers setting down roots.
Yet, Google has just broken ground on a $1 billion, 750,000 square feet datacenter campus in Mesa, east of Phoenix and to the west in Goodyear, Microsoft has a five-datacenter campus under development.
So what gives? Why would two of the largest cloud providers choose to build datacenters - facilities that require copious amounts of land, power, and a huge amount of water - in such a hot and arid place?